How Fast can you Reload openSUSE?

Well, it happened again. Not that this happens all of the time, but I had my Linux PC go down Tuesday night. I determined that the Power Supply went bad, so I purchased a new 600 W Thermaltake to replace my older 430 watt model. And of course, while at the computer store I see a Seagate 1.5 Tera-byte hard drive for $90US so I just had to pick up one of those. Then, I decided since I am such a fan of running SUSE from an external drive, why not do that too with the new drive. My old 500 GB hard drive was not dead, but the SUSE partition took a hit when the PC went down and I was going to need to reload anyway. I knew this because I took down my other computer and used its power supply to see if that was the problem in my Linux PC. Sure enough my Linux PC came up, but openSUSE did not. So now, I have a new 600W Power Supply ($60US before a $20US rebate), new 1.5 TB Hard Drive $90US and low and behold I see a new Vantec USB 3.0 external hard drive case which also will work at USB 2.0 until you have version 3 support. Cost for External HD case is, $50US. I then decide I need to run towards the cash registers as I can not afford any more bargains today and left spending $220US with local tax.

Of course I was asking about the time to reload openSUSE, not how to spend more money than you have to spend. Well, lets add in loading openSUSE twice. Say the first time you decide to go with the latest KDE 4.4.1 or what ever it was. Well, seems like something went wrong, I am not sure what, but I ended up with being unable to get Compositing to work, so I blew that away and went back to what works. I started yesterday around 7PM after installing the PS and putting the HD and case together and putting my other PC back together which did come back up running properly. By 11PM I was on my second install. This morning before work I started file updates and file transfers and this afternoon I am more or less done at 8PM CST. Total time for two reloads was … between 6 and 7 hours or an average of 3.5 hours to load/update/customize openSUSE.

I would like to hear how fast you can get up and running with updates and personal settings finished. I do hope this holiday weekend (for Easter) goes better for me.

Thank You,

I did a dual boot windows XP / openSUSE 11.2 desktop in 3.5 hours for windose and 3/4hour for Linux. Then duplicated the processes on a netbook again took 3.5hours for XP and 3/4hour for Linux.

Windows XP had virtually no apps while Linux installs included some 300 programs if you include the CLI stuff.

Windows XP loads really slow but openSUSE just screams along.

Well techwiz03 I think you beat me then. Of course I have loaded XP, Vista and now Win 7 several times, but to load the OS and all required applications including mail seems to take me around 5 hours each. As for Linux, it loads fast enough, but the updates and setting them up seems to take a lot longer for me. Then I have to setup mail, get my favorite programs loaded and it seems like 3.5 hours just for Linux is normal for me. So, you seem to be the unverified leader so far. I say unverified to make myself not feel so bad, you could be super human or something, like an xmen.lol!

Thank You,

Hi
You should look at scripting to set things up?


Cheers Malcolm °¿° (Linux Counter #276890)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 (x86_64) Kernel 2.6.27.45-0.1-default
up 4 days 5:21, 4 users, load average: 3.09, 1.60, 0.78
GPU GeForce 8600 GTS Silent - CUDA Driver Version: 190.53

malcolmlewis wrote:

> Hi
> You should look at scripting to set things up?

Scripting is good, but not everyone can do it.
Making copy of /home/ , /etc/ and export list of installed software from
YaST Software Management will do 90% of the work on next installation on the
same machine.

Another option is AutoYaST, which will work on the same type of hardware,
although I’m not sure how well as I never used it.


Regards Rajko,

Here because my setup is not so complicated.
Installation is 20-30 mnutes updates and additional applications I’ll give it
15-30 minutes and reloading/importing things from backup like mails and network printers setup another 30 minutes max for a total of 1.5 hours.

Took 90 minutes to reinstall 11.2 as I wanted it on my spare machine where I had been trying out KDE4.4.1 and, during an update, it managed to delete the kernel!

About half that time was downloading stuff that was not on the LiveCD.

Hahahaaaaaa, a clean install, incl. updates and config:
on the server: under one hour
on the laptop: 35 minutes.

This on a 50 Mb/sec internet connection, SSD on both machines, install from unpacked ISO on HDD. Both have about the same installed, incl. NFS, LAMP, loads of apps.

A recent update test from 11.1 to 11.2 took about 2 hours.

Well it would seem that I am slow as dirt in loading openSUSE. Knurpht claims to do it in 35 minutes! john_hudson claims to do it in 90 minutes! joerione claims no more than an hour to do the job. At 3.5 hours average for me one would wonder what the heck I am doing most of the time openSUSE is loading? Of course I do not have a 50 Mb/sec connect like Knurpht has. Mine is more like 1 MB which is faster than the old dial-up days, but not super fast. Still, the first part is loaded fully from the disk. I am including in my setup activating Samba and installing my UPS software, not that two more apps makes that much difference.

malcolmlewis thinks I should setup some installations scripts but when you have things working it is hard to get excited about spending the time to write such a thing and it is not all that easy to do as rajko_m does suggest.

Thanks to everyone for your comments.

I must admit I’ve done hundreds of installs. I do have a script that copies over the settings for the network services on my server etc etc. The only things I change during install are the partitioning + the addition of the kernel development pattern. That takes a bit more than just samba and ups software.
To add: even on the two Sempron 2400s we have, reinstall takes a bit more than an hour.
I always install from a HDD partition, that makes quite a difference compared to CD/DVD/Net

On my monster desktop it takes about 15 minutes to install and 15 minutes to update + set things as I like them.

Installing and updating on my desktop, no more than an hour I’d say.