mount points and sizes

[nspmangalore]

I am planning to do an custom installation of OSs on my laptop tomorrow.

i want to reserve a 10GB partition for Windows
i want to keep 2 other partitions of 10GB each for linuxes (fedora and ubuntu maybe).
i would want to keep in seperate partitions all sharable contents between the 2 linuxes (such as /home etc.).

1.
So, i wanted to know which of the folders under / can be shared between 2 distros, and which ones i need to allocate for each distro seperately.

2.
i would also like to know how much of space should i allocate for each mount points and a reason for having to keep it in a seperate partition.

eg.
MOUNT POINT SIZE REASON
swap 2 x RAM size needs to be seperate
boot ? ?
temp ? need to restrict it to some size so that it does not grow too large
usr ? ?
home rest of the space shared between the distros

Basically, what i want is to maximize what i can get from the avilable disk space.
Also, past experiences of people who tried this out already would help.

Thanks for all replies...

[3mm]

it's up 2 u taichi man :) ext3 is good between linux distros , also freebsd! :eek:

[nspmangalore]

let me rephrase the question again...

i install /home directory on a seperate partition during the installation of an OS (say fedora8).
then when i install the second OS (say fedora9), how would i indicate to it that the /home directory should use the partition that has already been created?

[sidebrnz]

Easy: you go into the custom partitioning, tell it to mount that partition at /home and not to reformat it. The only thing that might be a problem is if your user had a different ID number for each distro, but if you're the only user that shouldn't happen. As far as swap goes, in theory, you should be able to use the same for both, but I've read of problems from doing it, so you may well be better off keeping them separate.