On Wed, Mar 21, 2007 at 12:13:49PM +0000, Chris & Barry Chater wrote:

Hi Is it possible to put two different versions of Linux on my laptops new hard drive which is partitioned in two 20 gig halves. Say like Ubuntu and one of the other distributions for instance.

Yup.

Most modern distros (Ubuntu included) use GRUB for the boot manager. This means that you can choose which OS to boot when you switch the machine on.

You mention that you have already partitioned the drive. This might be a flawed approach if you partitioned it with another OS like Windows. Linux generally uses partition types that Windows doesn't natively know about.

You may also not have set aside some space for the swap partition(s).

Personally I would wipe the (assumed empty?) partitions and let the Linux distro do that during installation. Most (Ubuntu included) have a decent partitioning tool that lets you choose how much of the disk to give to each partition.

Cheers, Al.