Mark Hull-Richter wrote:
We are in the process of transiting from 4.4 to 5.0 and I may need to be able to switch back and forth for a while. Is it possible (or advisable) to run both 4.4 and 5.0 on the same machine, or does that involve a lot of reinstalling/repartitioning and a fair amount of pain (I have only one disk on the test machine for this purpose).
If it's just for the purpose of supporting software, I'd use some kind of virtualization and put 4.x in a VM hosted by 5.x. The only time you need a real machine (instead of a VM) is when you have some hardware level requirement.
I use VMware's free VMware Server to keep many Linuxen around, which I need so I can build RPMs for each of the many platforms we have in the field. Once you have a VM solution set up, you find that you then create still more VMs for testing and so on. It's liberating.