Multiple Tor Installs

[Ringo]

Hey Tor users,

I've got a question that hopefully somebody can answer. I'd like to have
multiple instances of Tor running at the same time for different
connections/identities (that would listen on different ports). Is there
any way to do this?

The only way I can think of is to compile separate versions from source,
manually give them different configs, and then running all of them from
a shell script. The obvious problem with this is that when Tor updates,
I have to do a bunch of re-downloading and re-compiling instead of using
the deb package.

Is it possible to just call Tor multiple times while specifying multiple
configs? I figure this might work but I wanted to check in case there
might be anonymity/security problems.

I'm currently on Ubuntu Ibex.

Thanks,
Ringo