ahhhhhhhh 2&3 are why my previous stabs at it didn't work. I did not copy the other's to the booting linux. So lilo would try to boot a different distro with another's kernel?

Since I have only three partitions on my linux hard drive, I am not doing too badly with using a floppy for second linux distro. I have kanotix & knoppix and they share a linux swap partition. I figure if I install a distro that I only want to play with and it does overwrite mbr I can just use my floppy to get back into knoppix and run lilo to overwrite it back

Not sure if I will try it, but adding to my humungous "information" folder. I am thinking about setting up a real searchable database for myself with all my linux information now - it really is getting big. Anybody have any suggestions on what to use? (in my previous IT life I was an access dba & analyst, yeah, I know boohiss ) I haven't tried mysql or anything yet in linux, still learning way much basic stuff.