Summary of what I need:
- I want install 3 different versions of Ubuntu on a computer.
- I would like to be given a choice of which OS to boot every time I turn on my computer.
- I would like to share Documents, Downloads, Desktop files, etc. between them. Basically, anything that can be shared that won't create problems by being shared between the operating systems. I would like this to be a completely separate disk (physically) where the OSs will be installed.
Note: The reason I am doing this is because each OS is going to have different tools to work on the same data. Unfortunately, many tools I need are simply not compatible with 16.04 yet (and might never be), and I don't have the time to try to hack everything into 16.04 if the normal setup fails.
I have googled this problem quite a bit and either the answer is really old (don't know if the answer is still valid or not), or it assumes I want/have a Windows boot as well, or the steps simply don't seem to have enough detail so I can follow them step-by-step (how to manually partition a disk to perform an installation is somewhat confusing to me). I found this blog article on sharing data between distros without sharing the things that you want to keep separate. http://www.linuxtoday.com/blog/2009/08/painless-linux.htmlPainless Linux Multi-boot
I'm pretty sure I can do the steps in this article without much difficulty, and I'm going to assume this blog article describes a good way to share data between Ubuntu distros. If you know of a better solution or why this is a bad one please share. I'm not emotionally attached to any particular solution at the moment and don't have any constraints on the solution either, but I need to start the discussion somewhere. Unfortunately, this article doesn't completely explain the issue I am working on, but I feel it is going in the right direction.
I want to install Ubuntu 14.04, 15.10, 16.04 (desktop versions) on one machine and no Windows installations. I'm assuming I should install them all on the same disk (which is a 250GB SSD), then use a separate disk for sharing/storing data as described in the linked blog article. Although, I have plenty of disks available if each OS should preferably have its own separate disk.
Anyhow, if anyone knows of a tutorial that will fill in the gaps in doing this please share it. I would prefer a link to a step-by-step tutorial so I can learn from it and save it for later.