Yes, you can if you wish to do so.

Darn...
When I installed Ubuntu I forgot to put the major portion of the drive into a partition which would not effect Ubuntu when I installed the next distro. As a result I just killed off the Ubuntu install when I attempted to install Fedora. Back to the drawing board!
"Note to self- Make /swap a single shared partition and place the majority of the drive in /home for division to other distro partitions later." I'm not seeing or reading another way to keep the major space of the drive open for additional installs (feel free to tell me if I'm headed down the wrong path by using /home as the major portion of the drive which can later be partitioned further for other distro installs).

hum... you can just "not use" some of the disk, and do something like that:

[2Gb swap][700gb \home-----------------------------][30Gb Ubuntu-----][30Gb Fedora------][rest of Gb free----------------]

And then add 30Gb partitions in the free space for each new install.

/free... doesn't get any more obvious than that, does it?
While I'm sure I'll have additional questions I just want to thank everyone who has added to this thread so far. Your help is invaluble and being provided an answer to a question here rather than having to search any number of websites and textbooks for that answer makes things so much easier. Answers here keep my eyes from glazing over as I read another website which has a heading which seems relevant but turns out not to have anything close to an answer to my question.
Thank you all, sincerely.
David

This multiboot idea doesn't work very well. I cannot seem to find a way for Grub to provide me with each of the distros as boot options. It will only load the last distro I installed. I have /boot as sda1 and still no go. I have /swap at sda5, shared.
What would the partition set up need to be to allow Grub to multiboot?
By the way Kubuntu 64-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit both work without issue in my notebook but Fedora 15 64-bit does not (very problematic). Haven't tried Debian or OpenSuse yet. I figured there was no point in moving forward with those installs when the other distros won't multiboot.

What does the set up need to be to allow for mutliboot?

Thanks,
David

IIRC grub will look for grub2.cfg file in your most recent install. (/etc/grub.d folder i think)

You need to edit the cfg file to include path to the other OS's, then run update-grub2 as root.

I'll see if i can find you a link on the wiki....

edit: Not on Ubuntu wiki but here is a good site to learn about grub2 and making changes

I found that the 64-bit distros installers include an option for dual boot... at least Fedora and Kubuntu do. I'm going to give the dual boot set up another try using that set up later today. Before I do so I'm going to create a Grub2 cd so I can boot from the CD and select the partition containing the distro I wish to run.

A question - I downloaded a copy of Corel Wordperfect 8 for Linux in Tar.gz compression. I added root and Alien, converted the Tar.gz to .deb and installed. It says it installed but I cannot find it in the "Applications" menu nor can I find it on sda anywhere. Where did it go and how do I use it? Why isn't it in my K-Applications-Office location?

Had Kubuntu 10.04.3 64bit and Ubuntu 10.10 64bit running in dual boot with no problems. Installed openSUSE 11.4 64bit and it wiped out all partitions except "swap" even though I went through and set a new partition from "free" for it. After killing off the other two distros it didn't install the Gnome GUI I selected leaving me with only command line. Re-installed it, giving it the whole drive, this time choosing KDE and it still didn't give me a GUI. Command Line only. I may need to download the ISO from a different server and create a new DVD and try again. In the meantime I'm giving Debian 6 64bit a try.
Debian 6 seems to be the most reliable so far but if you make a change to the drivers for hardware (specificaly Nvidia GeForce 9600M) you cannot eaily undo that change, even if it has a serious negative impact on the system (resolution dropped from 1920x1080p @60 to 1260x720 @0... well, it claimed 0 for the rate). Better mail program but doesn't work with Hotmail for sending mail... I like Thunderbird as it just works (I'd like to find how to set it up for "Read" receipts though) but isn't available for Debian (or Gnome perhaps).
Tried Ubuntu 10.04.3 32bit but my box was very slow with it. A surprise as you'd expect it to be more stable than the 64bit version.
Think I'll stick with Debian 6 and add Ubuntu 10.10 in dual boot.

Would still like to know what went wrong with the OpenSUSE installs. Tried twice - once with Gnome and once with KDE and neither provided a GUI. Command line only.

possible that the xserver failed to start (kernel module for the nvidia card didn't load or was not found), defaulting to the CLI.

from memory, xorg config file sits on /etc/x11. might have been worth opening this with an editor (vi/vim) to see what driver the xserver was using. there have been issues with the nouveau driver on some installs.

There are alternatives for xorg video driver to use with nvidia chipsets, though you'll need to first of all dump the configs into a config file i.e.
From there you can edit the xorg.conf file which now sits inside /etc/X11 using your favourite text file editor.

You'll need to edit the lines as specified here (this is from ubuntu documentation but nevertheless somewhat helpful).

With nvidia you have a choice of four video drivers. noveau being the current open sourced version of the driver which can and will have issues on its own. The legacy nv driver which has been part of Xorg for quite sometime along with legacy vesa driver which works with almost all video cards (albeit you can't expect pretty graphics and what not). Last but not least is nvidia's own proprietary driver known as nvidia (which needs to be downloaded separately if I'm not mistaken.