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To start off I'm not too good at this, I have minor/intermediate experience with Linux.

I have Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon and wanted to dual boot with Gentoo (latest version, amd64, hybrid iso). I looked up how install Gentoo, and got confused, and when I looked up how to dual boot I couldn't find anything useful for me. So does anyone now how I would do this?

Partition Table:

partition table

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For starters, you need to put Gentoo and Mint on separate partitions. So you will need to resize /dev/sda1 to free up some space and then create a new root partition for the other Linux. This is the bare minimum. You need at least 9GiB for the Mint partition and you can get away with far less on the Gentoo one. But you will probably want to give each at least 32-64GiB just to have room to breath and grow each installation. Both of these partitions will be a root partition ("/"). They are each the root partition for their respective distro.

To make your life easier you are also going to want three more partitions.

Before we talk about that I notice you have an extended partition. This indicates an MBR-based partition scheme which, in turn, means you can only have 3 other "primary" partitions. One of which is your current root partition and the other would be the partition I just advised you to create.

That leaves one free... this should be used for a boot ("/boot") partition. This boot partition will be shared between Gentoo and Mint... though I suggest letting Mint do the work of managing it and keep it unmounted in Gentoo unless you need to update your Gentoo kernel (if that sounds like Greek to you, you'll understand much more what that means when you finish installing Gentoo). The boot partition can be tiny... 2-4GiB should be plenty.

You will also want a shared data partition. This is where you will store movies, music, and the like that you wish to be shared between Gentoo and Mint. You will have to use a logical partition within the extended partition as you already have the maximum of 3 primary and 1 extended (counts as a primary). Thus you will also need to resize the extended partition to create empty space within it with which to create your shared file system. Do not attempt to share Linux system folders (/usr, /bin, /sbin, /opt, /etc, /home, etc) between versions of Linux. It will only end in tears.

Finally, you will want a second swap partition. It is possible to share the same swap partition between Gentoo and Mint if you never use the hibernation features of either... but it's still sub-optimal to do so. 16GiB is quite a lot of swap btw. Do you have 16GiB of ram? How much swap you need is ultimately dependent on how you intend to use your machine but the rule of thumb is "swap equal to the amount of ram you have (to support hibernation)." The old "twice your ram" recommendation is outdated. Dual booting eats up hard drive space fast so every little bit you can spare from swap helps.

That gives us:

1 boot "/boot"
1 Gentoo root "/ (on Gentoo)"
1 Mint root "/ (on Mint)"
1 Extended
 `-1 Shared "/mnt/shared"
  |1 Gentoo swap
  `1 Mint swap

From here it's just a matter of installing each distro. I'd suggest starting with Gentoo then installing Mint and letting Mint detect the presence of the Gentoo install when it replaces the Gentoo bootloader with its own. This puts Mint in the driver's seat when it comes to managing your boot partition and Mint is far more reliable and easier in general than Gentoo.

I'd advise against making Mint's root partition automount under Gentoo or Gentoo's root partition automount under Mint. That's why you have a shared partition they both can use. Also, keep your file system type choices simple... ext4fs is well supported by both Mint and Gentoo with minimal fuss.

I have a lot of fond memories of Gentoo. You will learn a lot about Linux while using it because it really makes you do your administration yourself. And Mint is probably the easiest "it just works" Linux out there. Polar opposites, but they compliment each other nicely. Enjoy.

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