Dual Boot Linux and Free BSD

[iamskew]

Okay, so while I'm on spring break from college in about 1.5 weeks, I'm going to build a computer for my two sisters to upgrade from their crappy old compaq (~1.2 ghz amd, 256 ram I think...haven't checked in a while)...
Between the compaq and what is laying around, I have 3 hard drives. An 80gig WD 8mb cache 7200 rpm, and 2 maxtors, one 80 gigs and one 60 gigs...not sure on their cache size or rpms.
Basically, I'll be using one or two of the drives for my sisters' computer. One will definitely be the WD.

Therefore, I'll be left with an old compaq machine and 2 hard drives (140 gig total). I figure there's no point in throwing away a computer that will still run, so I thought I would use one of the old hard drives and make myself a linux box.

So my first question in this: If I want to run linux and free bsd, will it be best to use 2 hard drives or just partition one hard drive?

The rest of my questions then are:

Is it even possible to dual boot linux and free bsd? (I have minimal linux and unix experience...i was a cs major for one quarter and used unix 2-3 times a week...but mostly just used emacs...I got an A, but it bored me).
Will it be difficult to set up a dual boot system with those two OSs if it possible to do? How would you do it?


Thanks,
skew

 

[Nothinman]

Is it even possible to dual boot linux and free bsd?

Sure, not sure about the FreeBSD bootloader but LILO and GRUB can do it no problem.

Will it be difficult to set up a dual boot system with those two OSs if it possible to do? How would you do it?

Shouldn't be hard, I would use GRUB since that's what I'm more familiar with. If you have 2 drives it'll be a little simpler, but FreeBSD only uses 1 PC partition so it wouldn't be much more work to use 1 drive for both.

 

[iamskew]

Awesome, thanks Nothinman. I may be pming you in a few weeks if I need help getting GRUB to work, as I'll basically be going in blind to this "project"

skew

 

[Nothinman]

I doubt it'll be a problem, but I'll be around.

 

[n0cmonkey]

The few times I did something like this (a LONG time ago, in a galaxy far far away) the FreeBSD bootloader worked fine. It also recognized everything out of the box so no configuration was necessary.