I originally tried Sues back in the early 90’s. I was impressed by it, but it also had some short comings which I cannot recall now.
My present system is a Windows 10 system…do I need to say anymore. I am tired of having to spend several hours after each feature update fixing mine and my wife’s systems. At this time I want to try four different distros of Linux.
I already have Fedora, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu installed. After installing each I updated and tweaked the systems to be the way I want them. My plan is to try each one for a month doing the things I do with my system. At the end of trying all of them I will decide which distro will become my new OS of choice.
My system at this time has 14 partitions. The numerous Windows partitions, and each of the Linux systems has 3 partitions as follows, /, /home, and swap. When I try to install Opensuse leap 15.1 the expert partitioner does not show me unallocated space, which I do have, and it seems to want to create a separate /boot/efi partition instead of using the existing one.
Here is my question, is there anyway during installation to make the expert partitioner show me unallocated space and let me create the partitions?
Yes, that’s an annoyance. I wish the installer would stop doing that.
In any case, using the expert partitioner, tell it to mount your existing EFI partition as “/boot/efi”. At some stage – when you tell it to accept the partitioning plan, it will warn you that your EFI partition is not at least 256M, and that your system might be unbootable. Just click the button to continue anyway, and all will probably be fine.
As for your other question: I’m not sure how to have it tell you how much free space there is. You might find it easier to just create the partitions you want before you start the install – maybe with “gparted” from one of your other systems. And then, in the expert partitioner, tell it which partition to use for “/”, for “/home”, etc.
Thanks for the response. I will get it a try tonight.
If installer insists on creating new ESP it is really regression, because it had been changed in the past as bug fix to not do it and to reuse existing ESP. Someone should open bug report then.
Tue Sep 25 17:05:18 CEST 2012 - fehr@suse.de
- propose reuse (without format) an existing EFI boot partition
(bnc#781689)
It’s not quite doing that. It is only insisting when the existing EFI partition is smaller than 256M.
It still seems a mistake to me. Somebody buys a computer with a 128M EFI partition, and the openSUSE installer doesn’t want to use it because it isn’t 256M. I think there’s already a bug report about this.
Happened to install Leap 15.1 on the following system:
erlangen:~ # lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 3.7T 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 32G 0 part
├─sda2 8:2 0 32G 0 part
└─sda4 8:4 0 3.6T 0 part /home-HDD
sdb 8:16 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sdb1 8:17 0 101M 0 part
├─sdb2 8:18 0 30G 0 part
├─sdb3 8:19 0 30G 0 part /Tumbleweed-SSD
├─sdb4 8:20 0 366.2G 0 part /home-SSD
└**─sdb5 8:21 0 39.5G 0 part **
nvme0n1 259:0 0 477G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 31.9G 0 part
├─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 32G 0 part /
**├─nvme0n1p3 259:3 0 413G 0 part /home**
**└─nvme0n1p4 259:4 0 100M 0 part /boot/efi**
erlangen:~ #
The expert installer does offer shrinking an existing partition. Being conservative I felt more comfortable with using gparted on existing Tumbleweed to shrink sdb4. Then I started installation.
I reused /boot/efi and /home. Select the drive in the left pane to display information. Select the existing partition in the left pane and click modify to create the mount point. / went to sdb5. Expert installer displays free space available and offers using all of it, but also accepts user input.
I ignored the warning about efi partition size and got a smooth installation. All partitions on the machine are ext4 except for a test install of btrfs.
Ok, so I did install Opensuse Leap 15.1. I created the partitions using gparted in Linux Mint. The installation went well, but after the reboot Opensuse replaced the standard Grub2 with Opensuse version. When I looked at the listed operating systems Linux Mint is missing. All the other systems are there. I did try to use Yast to fix it, but that presented me with a new issue. Linux Mint now appears but Opensuse is missing. All of the other systems do boot up with no problems.
How do I put Opensuse back into the boot manager ?
Available boots can be displayed as follows:
erlangen:~ # efibootmgr -v
BootCurrent: 0000
Timeout: 1 seconds
BootOrder: 0000,0003,0001,0002,000B,000C
Boot0000* opensuse HD(4,GPT,0497bfdf-73d7-47a8-9d8e-6b911574f774,0x800,0x32000)/File(\EFI\OPENSUSE\GRUBX64.EFI)
Boot0001* Fedora HD(4,GPT,0497bfdf-73d7-47a8-9d8e-6b911574f774,0x800,0x32000)/File(\EFI\FEDORA\SHIMX64.EFI)
Boot0002* ubuntu HD(4,GPT,0497bfdf-73d7-47a8-9d8e-6b911574f774,0x800,0x32000)/File(\EFI\UBUNTU\SHIMX64.EFI)
Boot0003* Manjaro HD(1,GPT,2fe6b58a-379a-4f6e-899b-8be22ef6e885,0x800,0x32800)/File(\EFI\MANJARO\GRUBX64.EFI)
Boot000B* ubuntu HD(4,GPT,0497bfdf-73d7-47a8-9d8e-6b911574f774,0x800,0x32000)/File(\EFI\UBUNTU\GRUBX64.EFI)..BO
Boot000C* opensuse HD(1,GPT,2fe6b58a-379a-4f6e-899b-8be22ef6e885,0x800,0x32800)/File(\EFI\OPENSUSE\GRUBX64.EFI)..BO
erlangen:~ #
Change boot order for defaulting to the preferred one, see “man efibootmgr”. Reinstall grub2 on Mint if necessary. osprober will detect openSUSE.
In Mint:
sudo update-grub
Thank you both. I will give that a go tonight.
Both suggestions worked well. Although I am a little disappointed. I know this is not the correct thread for what is to come and I am not expecting answers. After the install I updated the system did a little house cleaning, and than tried to install my printers. My main printer is a Brother MFC. The install of the software went flawlessly, but the print job does not go out. The other problem I have is a HDD connected to my router, Opensuse does not see it and I cannot navigate to it. Both Fedora and Linux Mint found the HDD and both of my printers installed without a hitch. I will try to work through these issues because I would really like to test out Opensuse.
Again to those that responded to me on the install issues, Thank You very much.