During install, I have to do manual partitioning because the only area for install
is the free space on second hard drive. Which free space is 29Gb.
Which you woyl think is enough…but oh no… openSuse 13.1 arbitrarily decides
to try and reduce the NTFS partition on there by 7Gb ON TOP of the 29Gb that
is available.
So, I did NOT install, and went with another distro that did not go against my
wishes during install.
Decided to post here and ask “Why does this distro do its own thing and ignore
what I tell it to do?”.
Any ideas here?
I don’t really know the answer to that. It’s hard to read minds. It’s even hard when you are trying to read the mind of a computer program that does not have a mind.
In any case, manual partitioning is the way to go. I almost always do it that way. I’ll give credit though – opensuse is one of the best distros for making manual partitioning reasonably straight forward.
openSUSE does not ignore what one tells it to do. Did you choose an ‘advanced’ install ?
I typically always customise my partitioning using openSUSE. I so not use the default openSUSE partitioning, but instead using the openSUSE installer interface, I select the ‘edit’ option for the proposed installation partitions, and tune it as desired. openSUSE has a very good interface here, but it does adopt a different approach than some other distributions, and it did take me a bit of time to become used to it.
This is your general story, but without detailed explanation on how you (tried to) tell the installer what you wanted, nobody can give a serious comment imho.
BTW, I think 29GB is not very much. The default partition offered, tries to create a Swap of about a few GB, a root partition of about 20GB and the rest for a separate /home. Most installations do not use half of the 20 GB and thus, specialy when you do not go for a separate /home, installation is possible. But as said as long as you do not tell us, what you wanted to do and how you tried to tell it to the installer, advice is difficult.
If you do try again, I would recommend you use the installation DVD (and not the liveDVD), and chose the advanced install and then when installing chose the ‘edit’ in the partitioning editor, choose to ‘rescan’ the hard drives within the openSUSE partitioner (so you can tune as you wish).
Also, be very careful wrt Grub2 as to where it places its boot loader and what it does to the MBR. It is possible you may wish to tune that also.
Best wishes and good luck. Thankyou for posting on our forum.
I recommend
- Start with clearing all unused partitions and if necessary re-size partitions using gparted live to create contiguous free space.
- During Partition Installation <uncheck> the box that creates a separate /home partition. With so little overall disk space, you need access to <all> storage as efficiently as possible and it’s difficult to know for sure ahead of time how much root or home partitions might fill.
- During Partition Installation choose “Advanced”, then “edit existing” unless you know to install a swap partition (recommended), root (required), home (depends on if you follow my previous point). Be sure to click through “Save” to the end to apply your settings.
- During main installation <do not> select KDE or Gnome. Although they are the Desktops which will do the most for you, they also use the most space by default. Instead, I recommend XFCE if you generally prefer Gnome or LXDE if you generally prefer KDE. Other desktops or no desktop can be chosen if you prefer to start with even less. No matter what Desktop you choose, you can always add apps from either KDE or Gnome (generally choose one or the other).
HTH,
TSU
On 2014-03-27 01:06, DeathDragon14 wrote:
> Decided to post here and ask “Why does this distro do its own thing and
> ignore
> what I tell it to do?”.
It does what you tell it to do, if you do tell it. And you actually have
to tell it, not leave it to automatics. If you leave the installer to
decide, it will decide what it thinks it is best, which may not match
what you think is best.
So you have to pick the reins and tell the installer what you do want it
to do.
So, instead of telling us here that you instead decided to use another
distro, you should have stopped the installation and asked us here for
advice on how to do that.
But of course, use any distribution you are happy with - it is all
Linux! 
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
To All:
- I am using the install DVD, not LIVE.
- I ONLY use manual partitioning, never auto.
- the 29Gb is ALL I have available to give to linux.
- I have also tried PCLinuxOS, Mageia 4, and Linux Mint and they ALL get by with the 29Gb
and I have it set to :
18 GB to /
2 Gb to SWAP
9 Gb to /HOME
And all 3 of those others a.) work perfectly fine with it, and b.) when I use MANUAL partitioning
NONE of them just ARBITRARILY just reduce the size of the NTFS partition by 7 GB for as far as I can
tell just because it feels like it. Based on all I have read, and what all I installed during the testing of the other 3 distros 29 Gb is MORE than enough.
Why?
ROOT (/) Assigned 18Gb still has 9Gb free
HOME (/HOME) Assigned 9Gb still has 7Gb free
The data just above is because I am still currently using Mageia 4. KDE desktop.
What I was asking basically is why does openSuse feel that is is acceptable to make a “land grab”,
and go against what I tell it I want? It completely ignores me telling it to confi the way mentioned above.
In my experience, the opensuse installer will do the same. It will accept that.
Unfortunately, we are not able to look over your shoulder to see exactly what you did.
What I would have done, is create the partitions first (before install), probably using “fdisk”.
In the install, I would have clicked on “create partitioning”. And then I would have clicked “expert mode” and ignored the warning about expert mode being only for experts.
This would show me the existing partitions. I would then right click and select edit on each that I wanted to use, saying where I wanted it mounted and whether to format.
On 2014-03-28 01:16, DeathDragon14 wrote:
> 3. the 29Gb is ALL I have available to give to linux.
> 4. I have also tried PCLinuxOS, Mageia 4, and Linux Mint and they ALL
> get by with the 29Gb
I install openSUSE on just 9. That’s not an issue.
> What I was asking basically is why does openSuse feel that is is
> acceptable to make a “land grab”,
> and go against what I tell it I want? It completely ignores me telling
> it to confi the way mentioned above.
No, you have not told the installer what you want. You made a
partitioning, and thought openSUSE would simply use that. Well, no, the
partitioner first does a proposal, according to what it thinks best.
And, as far as I recall, it prefers to shrink the Windows partitions it
finds, and often it leaves alone the Linux partitions it finds.
So you just say “no”, and tell it exactly what to use instead.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
On 2014-03-28 03:36, nrickert wrote:
> In the install, I would have clicked on “create partitioning”. And then
> I would have clicked “expert mode” and ignored the warning about expert
> mode being only for experts.
The other possibility is click on “edit partitioning”. It is similar to
the expert mode, but the starting point is the proposal. You can then
delete the partitions you do not want, use some others, or create new
ones. Up to you.
Of course, nothing is actually done till the “go ahead” at the end.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)
Again, you do not tell very much about wht you exactly did to instruct the installer to use your partitioning. You tell a lot about that it is possible to do it on other distributions, but that is not very relevant to how to do it on openSUSE.
Reading what you say, it is possible that you pre-partitioned those 29 GB. But then there is no free space to be found by the installer and thus the installer tries to find a solution in finding space in the already existing partitions. And it takes the partition used by Windows, because that is very often a good solution. When you want the installer to use free space for a partitioning proposal, it must realy bee free space. Thus NO partitions on it!
But again, you say you allways use manualy partitioning, but you never tell what you do. As others told you before, whatever partitioning offer you get from the installer (by first filling the disk with partitions or by having free space on it), you can ALLWAYS change that by clicking on that proposal in the list of “this is what I am going to do” and then create a custom/expert (or what the term is) partotion. And you can change that again and again until you are satisfied.
I’m not sure what you have in mind when you state “MANUAL” partitioning. I know when I state “MANUAL” partitioning, I understand that I select to edit the openSUSE wizard/installer proposed configuration, I then have the installer ‘rescan’ the hard drive, and I choose/configure the / (and if desired the /home) partitions. And it just works. By going to “MANUAL” (later on by selecting ‘edit’ when partitioning proposed) I am in essence changing what ever was proposed by default by openSUSE.
I suspect you have a different meaning.
openSUSE installer may do this, if the algorithm in the installer assesses this as being better for openSUSE GNU/Linux. But as all in this thread note, its a simple matter to edit the proposed partitioning setup.
I think the meaning of “MORE than enough” is debateable dependant on the user. I know users of the distros you mention, and they would never consider 29 GB as MORE than enough. Just the contrary. I would not dream of debating with them on this, as their views that MORE than 29 GB is needed for those very same distros you mention.
BUT having typed that … I also know that I have a laptop from our GNU/Linux club, that has only 40 GB on the HD. The WinXP partition has 25 GB and the openSUSE-13.1 partitions have only 15 GB allocated. openSUSE-13.1 works ok. But I would not say MORE than enough, because I know once I start putting videos and music and other apps on it, the 15 GB will get filled pretty fast.
The openSUSE user base DEMANDED that openSUSE provide a recommended partitioning, that the user base could then edit. This IS what is in place.
openSUSE does not ignore what you tell it. I can’t help but think you were not able to navigate your way through the openSUSE installer configuration menus here.
I say that because I have custom installed many dozens of openSUSE installs, choosing the custom partitioning that I want each and every time.
Thankyou for posting on our forum, and good luck with your efforts.