partitioning/kde or gnome - newbie here!

[slashthegreen]

hey, i'm new to linux, and opensuse, so hello everyone!

i've tried various distros using LiveCDs, and have settled on this one, just because it feels quite comfortable to use, and the community seems quite friendly - i'm very aware that i may need the help of you guys, which to be honest seems better to me, as i'd rather have some hands-on experts on my side than someone on the other end of a phone who doesnt know what they are doing!

Anyway, my key thing is partitioning. Vista has split my drive into 2 - C:/ (Vista) and E:/ (Data). I'd like to do a dual boot into Vista, when I need it, and openSUSE for everything else - and i'm planning to take some space off of E:/ (about 15-20GB). My question is, will I have to format E:/, the whole computer, or can i split the drive without losing any of my data on E:/?

Also, whats a swap drive? I'm sorry to ask such silly questions, but as mentioned, i'm new to all this, and i'm scared I could muck up my computer! (I do have a backup of Vista and my data though, so not all bad)

Also, on another forum I got told not to use KDE4, as it wasn't stable enough, and when i tried the LiveCD, I tried a few widgets, but it didnt let me load some due to OpenGL problems. Would it be the same with KDE 3.5? Also, how is gnome on this distro?

Thank you so much for this, and i'm glad to be part of the openSUSE community ^_^

[john_hudson]

Originally Posted by slashthegreen

Anyway, my key thing is partitioning. Vista has split my drive into 2 - C:/ (Vista) and E:/ (Data). I'd like to do a dual boot into Vista, when I need it, and openSUSE for everything else - and i'm planning to take some space off of E:/ (about 15-20GB). My question is, will I have to format E:/, the whole computer, or can i split the drive without losing any of my data on E:/?

You must use Vista's partitioning tools to create the partition on E: As long as you have the required space on the drive, Vista will create something the size you want.

When you get to installing openSUSE you will need to use expert partition mode to tell it to use the newly created partition.

Originally Posted by slashthegreen

Also, whats a swap drive?

A swap partition is a partition formated to work as an extension of the RAM accessible only to the Linux kernel (Windows does this by using any free space on the disk but this is less efficient because of read/write times)

If you are only thinking of 20G, you probably need to set up three partitions: something like 1G swap, 7G / [which is often called root but is not the same as /root] and 12G /home.

While you doing this, make sure your Windows partitions are mounted using mount points such as /windows/C and /windows/E. Otherwise openSUSE won't let you access anything on them and you have to go through a more difficult process to set that up.

Originally Posted by slashthegreen

Also, on another forum I got told not to use KDE4, as it wasn't stable enough, and when i tried the LiveCD, I tried a few widgets, but it didnt let me load some due to OpenGL problems. Would it be the same with KDE 3.5? Also, how is gnome on this distro?

How well KDE4 appears to you will partly depend on your hardware and partly on your expectations. It is still under development and so facilities that people have got used to in KDE3 are missing. How important that is depends on different people's use of their computers.

Both KDE and Gnome are well supported by openSUSE but you have to make a choice at installation. However, you can immediately go into YaST>Software Management and select by Pattern to install the other (or KDE3) alongside it. Then at the login screen, click on Session and choose which one you want to use. Logout to the login screen to select the alternative.

[slashthegreen]

right...got that sorted, vista is making me up a drive as we speak, and it was surprisingly easy, compared to what i thought it might have been like. Thanks for the help john!

as i mentioned, i'm planning to do a dual boot - i've heard people talking about grub - what exactly is it, and how do i use it to create a dual boot screen? also, the partition being created is an extended partition, and a logical drive, will it still be okay?

[gropiuskalle]

I must admit I'm pretty clueless about logical Volumes (never had to use them).

→ GRUB is one of the two most common bootmanagers, so it's the first thing you'll see after the BIOS - there you will be able to choose which System to boot via arrow-keys. Since it it automatically configured by SuSE during the installation, there's nothing much to worry about. Actually.

[john_hudson]

Since you can only have four primary partitions on a disk, most Linux distributions will create an extended partition (if one does not exist) and all the Linux partitions will be logical partitions (that is nothing to do with logical volumes as in LVM which you can forget about until you want to install a Linux distribution across two hard drives).

As far as the user is concerned, the installation and use is entirely transparent.

In order to dual boot, you need to have GRUB installed but the installer will also do that for you.

The program itself will be on your Linux / (or root) partition but the installer will overwrite the Windows MBR with a pointer to the GRUB file which will then put up a menu for you allowing you to select openSUSE or Windows on boot (or any other system such as a Windows failsafe system).

(One point which I don't think will affect you is that the start of the Linux partition must be within a certain distance (fairly large) of the start of the hard disk for the MBR to be able to reference it - GRUB has been around for eight years at least so the original limit probably looked massive).