I have been messing with a variety of linuxes lately and learned more than I intended about the guts of the install process due to my choice of a nVidia motherboard. So, finally, I am fairly confident that can get my hardware running after a HD install.

I have a plan now to run a dual boot system with a HD install of Knoppix (or possibly Morphix) as my work desktop and Knoppmyth (Knoppix flavor for the MythTV suite of multimedia and PVR apps). So, basically, I would like to set up Lilo or Grub to boot these. I am still working out partitioning a drive for this purpose. I have an 80G drive. What I would like to do is something like this:

hda1 4G Knoppix (with some other apps I need to work like emacs)
hda2 1G Swap
hda3 4G Knoppmyth
hda4 71G /home (for /home/me and /home/myth and /home/others)

I don't remember how much room Knoppmyth wants for / but it might be more and the standard install actually sets up a bunch of partitions that made sense the first time I tried it on a fresh drive, but I don't remember the specifics. So:

Can I use the swap for both? Does that cause any problems?

Can I have two different distributions point to hda4 without any problems? I know each distribution will have its own fstab to set all the mounts, but I need to review that concept again.

So many multi-boot how-to's get bogged down in the MS issues. I am just interested in the linux side.

I am curious about other installs like this. There are a bunch of specialized distributions out there and I know many people keep a few around just for variety. What have other people done?

Thanks for any advice.

nrj