I’ve looked around a bit and did not see an answer (forgive me if I missed it), so I thought I would ask here.
I am seriously thinking about installing 13.1 this weekend and was looking at some of the installation guide, prompting this question: when asked to select a desktop, is it possible to select more than one so as to install more than one? Or does the option to install additional desktops come later in the installation process?
Also, on the Suggested Partitioning portion of the installation, I see that one of the options is to import partition setup. Am I correct in thinking that option uses how your system is already set up and that this would be the option to pick if I already have a /home partition with data on it?
My current partition scheme (trying to recall from memory, but I suffer from sometimes faulty RAM lol!) has a 30 GB / partition, 300 or so GB /home partition and a /swap partition (can’t remember how big), formatted as ext4. I don’t dual-boot as I like to give myself completely to whatever distribution I am running, so I hope this division will be sufficient.
Suggestions or thoughts are welcome. Thanks much. I’ve really enjoyed poking around the forums so far. I haven’t necessarily found all the answers yet, but the reading has certainly been interesting.
You can install all the desktops or none or any selected from the list. Note that there are additional environments that are available that are not on the disk and any can be installed later of course.
Your partitioning sounds fine You did not say what you have installed or if you plan on a new install (keeping /home) or an upgrade from an existing openSUSE (which ver?).
Right now I am running LXLE 12.04 but plan to wipe it off my machine. I thought I wanted a more simplistic look on my machine, in part to conserve resources. However, LXLE actually doesn’t seem all that responsive on my system, so I’m ready to try something else, and I really like the polished look of openSUSE. This will be a new install, then.
When installing pay close attention to the partitioning scheme be sure that you DO NOT format home partition and DO mount it as /home That will preserve your personal stuff
You can allways start installing one DE. You can install easily more DEs later when the system is fully functional. The user can then choose from the login screen which of the installed DEs (s)he wants to use for yor next login session.
Early in the install dialog, there’s a screen where you select KDE or GNOME or OTHER. If you don’t want either KDE or GNOME, select OTHER. Else select which has to stronger preference. I’m not sure if it actually matters, but I would guess that if you select KDE, you will have implicitly selected “kdm” for the login screen, and if you select GNOME, you will probably have selected “gdm” for the login screen. You can switch between those later (after you have a running system), so it doesn’t actually matter. If you are not sure, go with KDE which is what will be preselected.
After you have gone through the partitioning, etc, there will be a summary screen. There, you can click on “Software” to make addition software selections. That’s where you can select additional desktop environments.
I always go with KDE on the early menu, and with GNOME, XFCE, LXDE as additional selections. Note that for some of those there is a base and a runtime. So there’s Gnome base and Gnome desktop (I select both). And, by the way, I use KDE – the others are for play.
Yes. I normally import. That requires fewer decisions.
Yes, those sizes should be fine.
I currently have 40G assigned to root, but I am using only 10G. That’s with 4 desktop environments plus texlive/latex. I set it to 40G to allow for future expansion (in future versions).
Note that the above discussion assumes that you are installing from either the DVD or the NET install iso. If you instead use the KDE live or the Gnome live, you have fewer choices and will have to add additional desktops at a later time.