Hey all,
I have two quick questions about OpenSUSE 11.0 before I install it after the release. The first question: how do I properly format the root and swap partition, leaving only the home partition. The last time I did this, I used Windows and had to fdmr in the Windows XP prompt from the CD to remove GRUB and actually boot into anything on my computer. It didn’t seem like the safest way to do it, so I’d rather avoid it this time. My second question is which package do I find to install KDE4 on my SUSE system. I intend to install Gnome as my desktop environment, but I also wanted to install KDE4 because of all the good things I’ve heard about it, but I don’t want to install the wrong package in YaST’s package selector during installation.
Thank you! 
If you have a separate home partition this is quite easy to do.
When installing and you are at the partitioning screen, select custom partitioning (for experts).
There you can select which partition to format as root (also giving it the mount point / ), the partition for swap (also setting the partition type to swap) and then only set a mount point /home (no format) on the home partition.
All other partitions you might have won’t get touched if you leave them be.
As for installing KDE4 along with GNOME… When you have the first selection choice, select GNOME (making it the default DE) and then later on in the install when you can edit the software selection that’s where you can select to add the KDE4 Desktop environment. All needed packages will be installed for you.
There has been some discussion about the DE selection screen when installing & we might be seeing a check box added to the DE selection screen so you can select multiple DE’s in one go.
Cheers,
Wj
Thanks, Magic!
So basically, I don’t have to touch anything until the install of 11.0 and there it will override (and format) my root and swap?
Thank you again! Saved me a lot of time searching and playing around with it.
Well glad to be of use
The installer will mostly set things right seeing you have an existing swap and root, but when it presents its proposed partition layout, customize it the way you want it to make sure the right partitions get formated and mounted. The expert partitioner is quite straight forward and easy to use but you need to know a little bit about how it works. Much easier than first having to ‘prep’ it with other tools.
If you feel more comfortable with it drop me a pm or add to this thread before you install to walk through the details.
One more thing: Since you already appear to have a working 10.3 system, it would be a good idea to print out /etc/fstab before starting. That way, when you get into the expert partitioner you can be sure that the same partitions are used for the new install.
(I have a complex partition setup with multiple OS instances and several other partitions so the installer ALWAYS guesses wrong for me. Having a copy of fstab at my side allows me to set up my partitions correctly.)