> I am a Java Developer who needs to sometimes test software using > various OS and jdk environments > Do you know of best practices installing in a multiboot fashion > Solaris + OpenSolaris + FreeBSD + Linux + ... + some Windows version > in PC hardware?
The best practice of multibooting is to not use it at all, if possible, and go with the virtualization (VirtualBox, VMWare, VirtualPC, ...) instead. Unless you have a real need for the real environment (to test specific hardware, work with high performance 3d stuff, or something like that), which is actually needed much rarer that you can imagine, having a bunch of different OSes in different windows under your fingertips will be much more productive. That'd allow you to keep even 50 various and different operating system versions besides one another, without a boring reboot to switch the systems. So, essentially, I'm suggesting you to try out VirtualBox instead. As for multiboot, if you want to boot opensolaris, you're kind of stuck with using opensolaris' grub with zfs support; so probably all the other OSes should be booted by it, but it gets very specific (and sometimes quite tricky) depending on the other systems you'll try to install. Cheers, Einar.
