[wellylug] Looking for a new distro

[Ewen McNeill]

In message <E1BqOM1-0005pw-KQ at pluto.digitalnetwork.co.nz>, "John C Barstow" writ
es:
>What's less clear to me is how to have multiple X servers, mono
>compilers, and GNOME instances on the same Debian box. If there's a
>Debian way I'll stick to that (out of inertia).

debootstrap the Debian flavour of your choice into a chroot, chroot into
it, and then upgrade it to the things you want.  That'll leave you have
multiple versions of GNOME, Mono, etc on the same box.  You'll
probably want some NFS or bind mounts in order to bring a common working
area into each chroot (or maybe you can use CVS/subversion/etc to copy
between the chroots).

To have multiple X servers on the same box you might be able to do that
(and point them at different virtual ttys), or you might need to use
something like UML and XNest.  (UML is also the best way for testing
kernels outside of hardware related matters -- such as drivers -- where
you really need separate test hardware.)

In any event I don't think you're going to find a single Linux distro
that is going to allow you to do everything you want in the base distro.

If you're not adverse to paying for a solution then I'd also suggest
considering VMWare as a way of having multiple "virtual PCs" on one
system with their own virtual hardware.  

I use various combinations of all of these to test various things, and I
mainly use Debian on my boxes (but I have a Gentoo box, a Mandrake box,
a Redhat UML, etc) too.

Ewen