Hi, I am a Debian user. Very experienced with Debian|Ubuntu|Mint. I’ve checked out Fedora a couple of times but I am absolutely clueless about .rpm based distros, and I’ll need some advice.
I’m awaiting delivery of my new laptop, which was sent out yesterday, and I’ve decided that when it gets here I’ll be putting openSUSE on it.
I’ve been playing around installing Debian on spare partitions for almost a week now trying to get an installation working to my satisfaction with gnome3, as practice runs for installing on my laptop.
Basically, Debian Sid + Gnome 3 = No Go.
So, I’m jumping out of my nice comfortable deb plane without a parachute straight into the deep end of rpm based linux.
I know I’ll have to ‘yum install’ rather than ‘apt-get’, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes. I have no idea what I’m doing, and I think it will be fun.
First thing I will need to know is how to get updates from my ISP. I’m with Internode, and they run a mirror at mirror.internode.on.net/pub/ (browsable with web browser).
So in my Debian sources.list I put mirror.internode.on.net/pub/debian/ sid main non-free contrib
Can someone please look through the folder structure at mirror.internode.on.net/pub/opensuse/ and tell me how to list that as my repository with openSUSE ?
And what file do you edit with rpm based distros to change repositories ? (In Debian I ‘gksu gedit /etc/apt/sources.list’)
Start reading here:
AFAICT, the only repos you can replace with an internode repo are the oss, non-oss and update repos. If you browse through internode’s pub/opeensuse directory, and you reach a page with a repodata directory, you can use the URL as a repo.
But given internode’s generous download limits, I wouldn’t worry about saving a bit of quota. I just let the repos default to what mirrorbrain gives you and it works fine.
Err, no. If you want the command line version, that’ll be zypper. If you want the graphical version (either GUI or curses), that’ll be Yast > Install and remove software.
I don’t know anything about internode, but the system normally ‘automagically’ selects the fastest mirror; now, this doesn’t always work perfectly (what does?), but probably the best idea is to try the default, and if that doesn’t work for you, ask again. No point in searching for alternatives, until you’ve found out that something is wrong with the default.
For a quick-n-dirty conversion guide from one command line package management system to another, try:
DistroWatch.com: Package management.
and to find what repo contains a particular package:
software.opensuse.org: Search Results
(although, I can’t say that I’d go as far as to recommending ‘one-click install’ - just use it to locate the package and add the repo manually, if you have to).
Ok. Thank you very much.
My other question is, when installing from a live disc, is it possible to bring up ‘expert install’ mode ?
Yes:
Have a look at this (particularly note image 5 and 6)
https://picasaweb.google.com/caf4926/114_Install
That’s not the Gnome 3 CD though.
My experience after needing to use Ubuntu for a while: Was that .deb under synaptic there? Oh yeah…
Hi and welcome 
I was Ubuntu user for some time before coming to openSUSE.
On openSUSE there is a whole directory in which You define the repositories :
/etc/zypp/repos.d/
The easiest way to manage them is using zypper or YaST (can be done with YaST ncurses interface if You don’t have X) but of course You can manage them from command line using any text editor You like.
Best regards,
Greg
On 2011-07-08 23:06, larsenguitars wrote:
> rpm based distros, and I’ll need some advice.
Just notice that the chit-chat forum is not the place here where people ask
for help 
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)