Live CD vs. Install DVD

I am brand new to Linux but am committed to switching from XP as soon as I can. I have been trying out openSuSE 11.0 KDE on the Live CD. It has had some problems finding some hardware, drivers, my network, etc. on my HP dv6000 series laptop. I ran a Live DVD of another distro, Sabayon, and since the thing is loaded with all kinds of 3rd party stuff, it finds everything on my dv6000 - wireless, everything. It finds my current XP partition and my network as well. Great. But.
I’d prefer to use openSuSE for several reasons: community, support, repositories, YaST…
A question, then. Does the installation DVD for openSuSE have a similar full complement of extras as a Sabayon-style DVD?
As I said, I’m new, and I need to hopefully be up and running as quickly as I can to continue with my work. I am more than willing to get my hands dirty, read the man pages and try things out for a long time to come, but it would really help to have it just run (or close to it) out of the box to keep up with work flow.

Does anyone know what more I’ll get with the DVD? I’ve looked but have not found an answer anywhere yet.

Thank you all, and I’ll see you soon.

tony

you get something like 3x the software on the dvd than cd.I always recommend the dvd,especially for those with slow or no internet,as it contains nearly all the software you need to get on-line

Andy

Further to what deltaflyer44 noted, you do get a lot more packaged rpms with the DVD. You also get a lot more desktop GUIs that you can choose to install, to give you a selection at boot time. The DVD provides Gnome, KDE3, KDE4, xfce, fvwm, and other Window Manager/desktops. Typically openSUSE live CDs prepared by Novell come with only one desktop … ie either Gnome (on one liveCD) or KDE4 (on the other live CD). The openSUSE-11.0 KDE4 live CD has a very early version of KDE4 and it is NOT recommended. (On the other hand the openSUSE-11.1 KDE-4.1.2 live CD, due mid-December, promises to be fairly good). Instead one can obtain openSUSE-11.0 liveCDs with KDE-4.1 or KDE-3.5.9 that were not packaged by Novell/SuSE-GmbH, but instead packaged by the openSUSE community.

Also, a comment about what sort of 3rd party drivers and packages you are likely to find on openSUSE. If they are free opensource drivers and packages, and if they do not deal with proprietary codecs (in the case of audio and video) then there is an excellent possibility they will be on the liveDVD.

But if these are proprietary drivers (such as provided by many graphic card, and wireless device suppliers) then it is likely they will NOT come with the openSUSE DVD. openSUSE is “open” and hence it tries harder than most other distributions to follow an open Source free software philosophy, which means openSUSE likely will not provide these proprietary drivers/codecs, while other distributions might.

However one can typically install these proprietary drivers/codecs on openSUSE by finding the appropriate 3rd party web site. There are guides and search engines specific to openSUSE to make this easier. But there will be a learning curve, and more effort on the part of volunteers to openSUSE are still needed to make this easier.

Thank you both, deltaflyer44 and oldcpu – all the software and desktop options built into the DVD will certainly make things easier to get some apps installed and get going at first. I’m a fan of KDE (2nd place goes to xfce), so I may wait for 11.1 on 12.18 as you recommend, oldcpu. Although, couldn’t I just upgrade KDE on its own? If that’s a bad idea or not possible, then I’ll try for one of the non-Novell discs and use that. Do you know of a good source for the DVD with a newer 4.x KDE?

And I guess that finding the network (learning how to set up SAMBA, right?), printer, and wireless card, etc. won’t be too hard to do. I’m sure that I’ll be able to get drivers pretty quickly – it’s all the usual nVidia, Brother, Broadcom wireless stuff that everyone else has to deal with.

Another question, if I may. I have an 80GB hard drive and Windows is going to go away completely. Would it make sense as a newbie to keep it simple and during the installation process just create a /, /home, and /swap, allocating 25GB, 50GB, and 5GB to each respectively? Then all the /boot, /etc, /bin, /sbin, and the rest (which are all still a bit confusing for me) would create themselves in the sizes they need within /, and would be easier to change later if necessary. Isn’t that what would happen? And having /home on its own just seems safer for my data, upgrading openSuSE as new versions come along, and testing other distros. Or do you think there is a better way to it?

Thank you both again, and if you have any thoughts on these new questions, I would love your input.

Tony

Waiting for 11.1 would be the ideal but I probably wouldn’t. Installing 11.0 and just upgrating the kde4 repo’s is the easiest solution in the short term. There is no dvd with current factory of kde4. Another option is to get the latest devel. ver. 11.1beta5 which you can upgrade when the final is released.

FYI anything over 512mb for swap is overkill really. But there seems to be some variation in opinion here. Give it 1GB and be done.

Yes, do
/
/home
swap

leave the rest to the installer. You could keep / down to 20GB.

It can be useful to keep windows. Sometimes newbies, even skilled Linux users, can have problems with one’s networking/internet on a Linux PC, and to have an alternative way of accessing the internet can be very useful.

Even if one has another PC on a network for that added functionality, it can still be useful to have a partition with another OS (linux or dos or windows). In my case, for example, on one of my PCs that I built myself, where I don’t have a licence for Windows, I have freedos as a 500 MByte boot partition. Having freedos is handy for possible BIOS updates and other reasons.

So if it were me, I would download freedos, and burn it on to a bootable CD. Then reformat the hard drive, assigning the 1st primary partition about 500MB. Make that partition the active partition and boot to it with the freedos CD and install freedos. Confirm you can boot to freedos. Then go ahead with the openSUSE install.

I would say yes, keep it simple. Unless you have a large external hard drive to help share your data, given you only have 80GByte, I would recommend reducing your / from 25GB to 20GB. Reduce your swap from 5GB to 2 GB or 1 GB (depends on your RAM). And give the rest of the space to you /home.

The are not easy to change later. It can be done. But in years of using Linux I’ve always stayed with the simple / and /home (and a swap and a freedos) partitions.

Good luck!

Thanks, caf4926 and again to you, oldcpu. It seems you are in agreement. I can reduce swap to 1-2GB (I have 1GB in my HP) and give say, 25GB to /, then that will leave me plenty for now in my /home partition. Simple is good, especially in my case.

One consideration in / is to leave enough space for additional apps, though with the DVD I may not need too much more. Do you have any idea what the installed size of the open SuSE DVD is? There are a few miscellaneous programs that I know I’d like to add (Komodo Edit, Wine, and a few others) and I’d hoped to reserve the room.

As far as Windows goes, I do want to get rid of it. I’m fed up with it, I just can’t afford the space and I see no reason not to start my learning curve now. Hopefully it’s not too steep…

But the idea of freedos is something I had not looked into - I will check that out right away. It could be a good, small safety net, as you say.

I will try to wait for the 11.1, but if I can’t then I’ll give the 11.1 beta5 a shot, live with the bugs (of course, with what little I know I probably won’t know a bug from my own mistakes…) and then do the upgrade in December. BTW, is the upgrade a weird thing for a newbie, or is it usually fairly straightforward?

All in all, what you both say makes a lot of sense, and I’m glad I asked before diving in. So thank you.

Tony

I have never really taken much notice of the install size. Trouble is from the Default KDE I add lots of package in.

I’m guessing but default install of kde3 or 4 may be 1.5GB - 2GB

Thank you. Based upon everything you both have pointed out, a / of 20GB will probably be enough. more for home, which I’ll need sooner or later…

At the moment, I am now working my way through the 11.0 read-me sticky that you put at the top of this forum, oldcpu. Much good stuff in there, and thank you for doing that. It will help a lot.

Tony

Tony, Nice to see you are taking some time preparing for this. It can be a great leap of faith. Don’t expect it to plain sailing. It’s almost like starting right back at the beginning - you know, when you first sat in front of a windows PC, learning the ropes.

Stick with it, you’ll never look back.

Thanks, caf4926. I’m fully expecting that, and quite up for it. After all, we all did sit down with some kind of box that first time, didn’t we? Hey, what’s the worst that could happen, anyway? Things take a little longer for a while, and then it all falls into place.

Adios, Redmond - hello, World.

Just some thoughts on partitioning, and a couple of examples …

On our old family laptop, with a 60 GByte hard drive, we have a dual boot with

  • 20 GBytes for Linux
  • 20 GBytes for WinXP
  • 20 GBytes for a vfat data partition for sharing data

The Linux partition is very small and I have to pay careful attention so that it does not grow. In that case, I do not have a separate / and /home (although I do have a separate swap), and hence it is a real pain every time I install a new Linux version. This PC was setup before ntfs-3g driver came out. Some day I may reformat and remove the vfat partition, giving 1/2 of that to MS-Windows and giving 1/2 of that to Linux (and then re-install Linux such that I can have a separate /home).

On my mother’s PC, with an 60GByte hard drive, I have a triboot with:

  • 5 GBytes for WinME (which my mother loves, as she learned about computers on this)
  • 25 GBytes for WinXP
  • 20 GBytes for Linux
  • 10 GBytes for a vfat data partition for sharing data

I had to keep other family members happy wrt the various partitions, hence the above was a compromise that I was not totally happy with.

The Linux partition is very small, divided up into 10 GBytes for / and 512 MBytes for swap and the remainder for /home. I am constantly hovering between 400 MBytes and 600 Mbytes free on her / , which is very risky. If her / fills up, her PC will not boot. But I know enough about Linux to keep her PC functional. My plan in Jan 2009 is to add a second hard drive on her PC, remove Linux from the main hard drive, and put it on her second drive.

So the above illustrates you can get away with smaller drives .

If it were me, and your Windows was functional, with say a 40 GByte hard drive, then I would remove most programs from Windows, and I would defrag the hard drive, such that I got Windows down to about 7 GBytes. In essence keep Windows such that it can access the Internet.

Then I would install openSUSE (while keeping Windows), keeping 10GBytes for Windows, and on the remaining 30GBytes install Linux, and I would assign, 15 GBytes to / and 1 GByte to swap and 14 GByte to /home. Given small drive size, I would not go above 1GB for swap, and if only 512MB of memory, I would keep swap at 512MB.

We might also mention in addition to the above by ‘oldcpu’ (which setup would give me the willies)
You can and would enable the removal of temporary files at re-boot and keep a small cache setting in browsers, empty deleted and junk mail folders on quit.

All the dvd packages is available with install feture

Yes oldcpu, that’s a tight one. Makes my 80GB hard drive and 1GB RAM seem luxurious. I’m sure I can make it on this drive for a while and if I pare down my / to 20-25GB then giving the remaining space to /home will be sufficient for the time being. I’ve been getting away with it so far, and that’s with a full Windows installation and an 8GB-sized program files folder.

With my 22GB of user files I still have about 20GB of total free space (25%). So, by running fewer apps and with open SuSE being a lighter OS than Windows, I should be fine. And if I leave that small partition for freedos as you recommended, I still have sufficient room.

By the way, I can access the internet with no problems off the Live CD – it’s just my local network and printer (to which we are all connected via the router) that it won’t yet read. So I won’t be totally cut off (from help…) and can just figure out how to get it to see the other 2 Windows machines in my workgroup (we’re all on laptops). But I suppose that’s a question for another forum heading, no?

And yes, caf4926, I do empty everything from temp all the time, just to keep things clean, and will be sure to keep that up.

Great advice from both of you, and I thank you very much.

You are more likely to get help on those if you start a new forum heading.

Before installing, do not forget to trim your winXP as much as possible (remove as many apps as possible that are not needed) and then you absolutely MUST defrag immediately prior to install. Prefereably unlock the swap file (what ever that is in WinXP) and unlock the recovery file (what ever that is) immediately prior to defragging. If you do not do that you could have install problems.

After you have openSUSE install, you can once again tell WinXP to lock the swap and recovery files (it will more them somewhere else).

I know how to defrag XP, but I don’t know how to do this swap/recovery stuff on XP myself, its just something that makes sence, that I have read (my wife always does this for me).

Thanks for that, oldcpu. But, the more I think about it, the more I believe I’ll just lose XP altogether, look into installing the freedos partition you recommended earlier, and just go with Linux. In which case, if I am letting YaST refomat the drive (with 4 partitions: /, /swap, /home, and freedos) I can just dive on in, right?
After all, I’m going to learn it sooner or later, so why not now? If I set it up as you have recommended, then I’ll have freedos to fall back on, worst case. So, it may be a little rough at first, but I expect I’ll get through it.
That’s one reason I’m trying to find out as much as I can before I dive in…which you folks have helped with a lot.
Thanks, and I will take your advice and head for the networking area if I run into some of the same problems I’ve had with the Live CD’s not finding my LAN, networked printer, etc. after it’s installed.
Not sure I can wait for 11.1 (I’m actually online in the Live CD environment right now); I’ll try, but in any case, wish me luck…