Newbie User - OpenSUSE Installation - Image without X:

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi everybody,

After more than 4 years, I’m moving away from Gentoo and looking for an easier ARM32 image for my personal server. A friend recommended me OpenSUSE but I can’t seem to find one image that do not have X installed (BananaPi). Can I use/install SUSE without X? Any image that doesn’t come with X pre-installed?

Thank you,
Amid

#2

Use the little NET installation image. Once started you’ll soon see a selection screen featuring such an option, as well as an option to select in great detail what you want installed. The regular DVD image includes the same options.

#3

Thanks for your promptly answer.

Some additional questions, however. BananaPi is an ARM processor and I couldn’t find the NET versions for ARM, only for ARM64. For regular ARM, the best I could find was this: https://en.opensuse.org/HCL:BananaPi, thus, leading to another questions: is the repository for ARM arch (not ARM64) actively maintained? Tried to use the suse package search tool but it doesn’t show architectures.

Insights on how to proceed?

#4

openSUSE only has 1.5 arches any more (i586 on Tumbleweed only, i586 & x86_64 on Leap), and will be x86_64-only before a whole lot longer. Debian has a net installer for ARM and with the appropriate installation options will not install X. I use these installation parameters for Debian to get a minimal installation without X and with networking:

tasks=standard base-installer/install-recommends=false
#5

So instead of moving to SUSE, Debian should be my best bet? I was moving to SUSE because my friend told me that YAST makes the life easier for managing servers and APT is nowhere close to that. Mmmmm. Will have to re-evaluate my options now. Anyway, thank you!

#6

YaST2 is a general purpose configuration tool written in Ruby, with both ncurses and GUI versions. It’s also the foundation of openSUSE’s powerful and flexible installation, the reason why openSUSE doesn’t have or need a multiplicity of installation images. It’s letters mean yet another setup tool. It is one of the larger reasons why many people like openSUSE.

Apt is a text-only front-end to dpkg, the .deb format package manager. openSUSE’s equivalent to apt is zypper, a text-only front-end to the .rpm format package manager rpm. Much of what YaST2 can do is possible in various GUI DE settings utilities, such as KDE’s systemsettings5.