UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

My current machine is a Macbook pro running Snow Leopard. I want to mess around with various *nix OSes but not in a way that threatens the current working condition of this machine. The way around this seems to be to install various operating systems on a largish flash drive, boot from that, and mess around on the drive itself without touching the hard disk. My tentative plan is something like this.

Use a 16 gig flash drive as a boot disk for various systems, partitioned four ways into 4 gig partitions. I'm planning on putting FreeBSD on one partition, Arch Linux on another, Haiku on a third, and using the fourth as a communal swap space.
Use a 1 gig flash drive as an installation medium, i.e. turn it into a live bootable drive for whatever OS I want to install at the time.

Before beginning this project, I have a few questions.

1) Is this even remotely a good idea?

2) Will 4 gig partitions be enough? I know Arch can be run on practically nothing, and the FAQs for FBSD and Haiku imply that 4 gigs are within the minimum system requirements, but that doesn't really explain how constraining such an environment would be.

3) Should I include a swap partition on the flash drive? It doesn't seem to be good for the longevity of the flash drive, but swap in general is needed and I really really do not want to touch my main boot disk.

4) Is this feasible for a non power-user? I know my way around Unix-like systems, but one of the main reasons I'm doing this is as a learning experience. Hence, I expect to have to learn a lot of stuff, but I want to know if I should attempt this sort of unconventional/strange setup without more experience under my belt.

5) Are the above OSes interesting and different enough to warrant individual investigation? This is a bit of a subjective and personal question, but I do want to try to get both a fair bit of breadth and depth of perspective on the differences, weakness, and strengths of the various OSes out there.


Any tips, tricks, warnings, and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a lot in advance.

In theory, a partitioned USB bootable system should be doable but so many systems are so bad at booting USB that I wouldn't depend on this setup working anywhere, ever. And the perennial problem with multibooting is, one slip-up and you lose absolutely everything else on the drive.

Another problem is that different OSes may demand different partitioning schemes, and naturally more than one type of boot sector can't coexist on one drive.

How much space is necessary depends on your OS and your needs. You can run linux in 200 megs but don't expect a fancy GUI system.

What's a "power user"?

I wouldn't bother with Haiku. BeOS was discontinued before 64-bit x86 processors were even invented, and every open release since then has been not just backwards-compatible but binary-compatible with it -- a bit of a dead end. Linux and BSD are indeed quite different from each other.

In the end, I'd just get another hard drive for your computer, swap it in, and see what you can install on it. Without a normal computer though, even that's going to be difficult. Maybe you can find a "throwaway" PIII/P4 system someone'll part with for a song and play with things safely on a computer that's not your main one.

That's probably what I'll end up doing then. Never hurts to have another computer lying around, and it definitely seems less risky than trying to mess around with multibooting off an external device. Thanks for the advice.

A lazy term that I use to refer to anyone with more computer experience than me, e.g. someone who codes in Assembly or machine language, compiles their own kernel, mines their own copper to draw into wires for ethernet cables, etc. I should probably stop using it as it's neither helpful nor descriptive.