My wife finally let me install openSUSE-12.3 on her main desktop PC. Her PC has an Asus motherboard with an Intel Core i7-860 CPU, 6GBytes of RAM and a rather basic nVidia GT218 Graphics. Her PC has two hard drives (one old IDE and one newer SATA).
She is an MS-Windows user, but she does like to have a GNU/Linux install (in a dual boot) on all of her PCs, in part as a backup and also to learn a bit about GNU/Linux (as she uses GNU/Linux and Unix where she works).
I installed from the 64-bit openSUSE-12.3 DVD, selecting the KDE desktop and the legacy grub. I was careful to ensure grub was NOT installed on the MBR and selected the grub boot from the extended partition (as my wife’s GNU/Linux is on the SATA sdb6 ( / ) and sdb7 (/home) which is identified as the second drive in her PC). That second sdb drive (SATA) is marked in the BIOS as her boot drive, and the extended partition of sdb is flagged as the active partition.
The network devices (Ethernet on the motherboard) were not configured during the install. After the install completed I went into YaST and quickly configured the one Ethernet device connected to our home LAN (providing Internet connectivity).
I kept my wife’s old /home from her openSUSE-12.2 install, and noted that openSUSE-12.3 KDE changed the theme on my wife’s desktop, so I had to change it back to the theme that she liked. I then installed Skype, Chrome browser, and the proprietary VirtualBox version on my wife’s PC (with the VirtualBox guest additions). Since I kept my wife’s old /home, the guest Operating System that was in her /home was immediately recognized when I ran VirtualBox. I setup our network printer/scanner (HP C309a) with no problem, testing successfully both network printing and network scanning.
I added a mount point to her NTFS data partition (under /windows/E) and modified the fstab so as to provide her write access in addition to read access to that partition.
I also added the Packman packager repository to her openSUSE repository configuration, and installed a number of multimedia applications from Packman. And I installed the program gImageReader that malcolmlewis was good enough to package for openSUSE users (where I use gImageReader to OCR different language text).
I also setup her desktop for Thai language fonts as a secondary keyboard/font (using both YaST and KDE desktop configuring).
There is not much more to add - other than to emphasize this was a SUCCESSFUL SMOOTH INSTALL.
I note this was her PC setup with opensSUSE-12.3 using the nouveau driver.
System: Host: kob-corei7.darmstadt Kernel: 3.7.10-1.1-desktop x86_64 (64 bit)
Desktop KDE 4.10.2 Distro: openSUSE 12.3 (x86_64) VERSION = 12.3 CODENAME = Dartmouth
Machine: Mobo: ASUSTeK model: P7H55-M version: Rev X.0x Bios: American Megatrends version: 1002 date: 08/09/2010
CPU: Quad core Intel Core i7 CPU 860 (-HT-MCP-) cache: 8192 KB flags: (lm nx sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx)
Clock Speeds: 1: 1200.00 MHz 2: 1200.00 MHz 3: 1200.00 MHz 4: 1200.00 MHz 5: 1200.00 MHz 6: 1200.00 MHz 7: 1200.00 MHz 8: 2801.00 MHz
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GT218 [GeForce 210]
X.Org: 1.13.2 drivers: nouveau (unloaded: fbdev,nv,vesa) Resolution: 1280x1024@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: Gallium 0.4 on NVA8 GLX Version: 3.0 Mesa 9.0.2
Audio: Card-1: Intel 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Card-2: NVIDIA High Definition Audio Controller driver: snd_hda_intel
Sound: Advanced Linux Sound Architecture ver: k3.7.10-1.1-desktop
Network: Card: Realtek RTL8111/8168 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller driver: r8169
IF: eth0 state: up speed: 100 Mbps duplex: full mac: 20:cf:30:ac:00:0c
Drives: HDD Total Size: 1000.2GB (13.5% used) 1: /dev/sda ST3500630A 500.1GB
2: /dev/sdb Hitachi_HDS72105 500.1GB
Partition: ID: / size: 25G used: 6.4G (27%) fs: ext4 ID: /home size: 202G used: 120G (63%) fs: ext4
ID: swap-1 size: 2.15GB used: 0.00GB (0%) fs: swap
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 45.5C mobo: 28.0C gpu: 37.0
Fan Speeds (in rpm): cpu: 1454 sys-1: 1721
Info: Processes: 194 Uptime: 0:12 Memory: 690.0/5945.3MB Client: Shell inxi: 1.7.24
and after updating to the proprietary nVidia graphic driver it was the same, with the exception of this for graphics and audio:
Graphics: Card: NVIDIA GT218 [GeForce 210]
X.Org: 1.13.2 drivers: nvidia (unloaded: fbdev,nv,vesa,nouveau) Resolution: 1280x1024@60.0hz
GLX Renderer: GeForce 210/PCIe/SSE2 GLX Version: 3.3.0 NVIDIA 313.30
I then set in grub windows7 back to being her default boot, and pretty much all should be transparent wrt her noticing the update.
This wasted a lot of time and bandwidth so I wouldn’t recommend it if you have some download restrictions with your ISP but the solution works for me.