Partitioning for Multiple Linux Distros Boot on One Drive.
Ubuntu (and most other distributiions) uses gparted to modify hard drive partitions. What is described below works with Ubuntu 7.04, Feisty Fawn.
When you get to the "Prepare Disk Space" screen, select the "Manual" option by clicking on the radio button. Then click the "forward" tab in the lower right-hand corner of the install window.
That action causes the gparted program to scan the disk(s). If you are doing a dual-boot installation and the windows partion (C:) is all that the drive shows, the first job is to resize the windows (ntfs) partition. Typically, this shows up as either hda1 or sda1 and is type ntfs.
Click on the ntfs partition. Then click on the edit option. The first line is "New partition size in megabytes"; you are going to reduce the size of that partion to generate the freespace needed for your linix installation. You will get a warning that the action is irreversible. Continue with the resizing; you will get a "resizing the partition" window while this process is going on. You might want to make a cup of tea or coffee while this process is going on as it takes a couple of minutes on new hardware.
Once that is accomplished, select the "free space" and consecutively create: a partition for the OS, a swap partition, and a /home partition. Your partition types are ext3, swap, and ext3, respectively. This utilizes all of the four allowed primary partitions. If you are planning on two versions of linux, create two ext3 partitions and make the swap and /home partitions "logical" (do them last, too). Then, install the non-Ubuntu OS first and Ubuntu should give you a boot option for both it and Ubuntu when you finally install 7.04
Pretty easy, no?