im going to be getting an eee 901 and i would like to put opensuse 11 on it. i have access to a 1g thumb drive and i would like to start with a minimal X installation but it sounds to me like when you install opensuse you need an additional driver to make the ethernet/wireless network work. this leads me to believe that the wired driver will not work if i use a net install disc. i cant fit a dvd of opensuse onto the thumb drive but i can fit the standard cd images on. the only issue is that i dont think you can do a minimal x install from a KDE4 or gnome installation and i dont want kde4 or gnome i want either kde3 or xfce (depending on how the system performs). does anyone have a sugestion on how i should do this? so far i have looked at the following sites.
OpenSUSE on the EeePC - openSUSE
this site seems very convoluted for the install process and i dont know how to burn that liveusb image (plus its 10.3 not 11) suggestions are welcome if you think that this has some merit to it or if there is a way to translate this over to 11.
SuSE install from USB drive - openSUSE
this seems like a good guide to create a live usb but its using the default images so i dont think i can use this because it will be too big if i do dvd and no network driver if i do net install.
does anyone have a sugestion on how i should install this?
EDIT: i reread the first link i posted and it makes more sense to me now, although i still dont know the dd command to copy over the liveusb image. my only concern is if the first method is a 10.3 or 11 image. in the end i want a minimal x11 opensuse 11 system that i will install most likely kde3 packages on. with the second method i see that it describes it for the 10.3 GM cds which if i recall correctly allows you to alter the packages you install as opposed to the 11 live cds which will only copy over all of the packages on that install disc.
is there a way to alter the software to be installed in the gnome/kde4 live cds or is it just going to be more worth my while to do a complete binary update?
I have done what your attempting. I had no luck with the Wireless card, though they are Debian drivers for it (as I recall). I set up a Samba server, mounted the ISO to a Folder and shared it. Then booted with the Mini Install CD (70MB) via USB CDRom and setup my install source as smb://ipaddy/networkshare/opensuse10.3 This worked out well. The other thing I have done since is built a PXE server, the onboard NIC is PXE compliant. The problem with my setup was I had the 4 GB HD, with meant limiting the amount of applications I loaded on it. Love it, found the on board NIC with out issue. And the HD was great. Gota love that solid state HD.
I later looked up some hacks, and found out how to turn off the Toy like GUI, and configured KDE on it from the Internet Sources. Which gave me wireless access.
Good Luck with it, you will love the results. I hated selling mine.
thanks im feeling a lot better about getting this now especially since i can just use a smb share for the iso. so you used a 901 and the on board wired nic worked out of the box? i heard rumors that it did not.
edit: if the wired nic works then i can just use the net install disc with the normal sources online cant i? if not i think i found a solution to my problem anyways. i have an 80gb external usb HDD im not using which i can use like a usb key as per the usb instructions.
Yeah, the nic worked great on mine. As stated above, I just booted with the mini cd from a USB CDRom and performed an install from a network source. I wouldnt load the OS to usb HD, as I found the USB performance to be poor. I would load the OS on the internal HD, and mount the /home dir to a 8GB usb thumb drive.
The only reason I went back to the original Linux OS was for easy wireless access. Other wise I would have kept OpenSuSE 10.3 on it.
nice thats a huge relief. i wasnt going to boot up the os from usb though. i was just going to treat it like a usb flash drive to put the opensuse dvd on so i could install onto the 4g internal. but it sounds like my 1g flash drive will work fine now since i can use the net install.
