I thought I'll chime in with my thoughts about the myriad open source
releases and how to keep up with them while staying environmentally
friendly.

I recently got myself a 320 GB hard drive ($80 or so on Amazon) and used GPT
(as opposed to legacy MBR) to create 30 or so 10GB partitions. You can use
GNU parted or the gpt(8) tool on FreeBSD to do this. One of these partitions
is a fat32 partition to which I download the ISO of the new OS release I
want to test.

I've been using unetbootin live to them boot the installer from a USB key.
No blank CDs to throw into a land fill 6 months later.

Of course you can use virtual machines to do all of this. But my objective
was to find out how these OSes perform on a netbook.

Problems:

* Some OSes don't support GPT (eg: nexenta doesn't support partitioning at
all)
* Some BIOSes don't support booting from a GPT formatted disk (HP laptops)
* Some BIOSes support booting only from a 64 bit EFI (Macbook pro)

 -Arun
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