I have had a couple of goes at building a light weight opensuse for a notebook on this. The 1st one was a disaster as it cam up with a number of dependencies. Not sure how as it seems to pull things in as needed.
So far I have failed to get a build to boot to a desktop which in this case I chose as LXDE. Might need to change that to Xfce due to certain software I want to install as not sure if LXDE is supported.
The help files show a minimum X starter for light weight desktop installs but it doesn’t seem to be available any more. I found selecting text based server to get more of what I need eg YAST and Firewall. It might find itself running cifs or nfs anyway.
One aspect I am not clear on is when say an LXDE desktop is selected if that pulls in all of it’s dependencies including enough of X. It didn’t seem to as LXDE_Base wasn’t included and what constitutes minimal X to get LXDE going isn’t clear.
Anyway it boots through to reached graphics and just stops there in console mode - no desktop but will accept logins. This leaves me at a loss as I expected it to behave like an installation disc and sort this all out. Obvious complications in respect to the graphics the build eventually runs on but there is some mention of sorting that out.
Where am I going wrong?
On alternatives one idea might be to install onto a USB stick but all of the utilities seem to be based round live cd’s and none offer the opportunity to install onto a usb stick as a raw disc image. I have wondered about trying to do that using a 32bit distro iso on a 64bit machine and basically telling the install to leave everything else alone and just install to the stick. If it can then be made to boot on the other machine I can be more confident about just using the install dvd. All sorts of problems some of which might be solvable by editing files on the stick. I do for instance know what the screen resolution of the netbook is but not sure about compatibility in terms of driving it. Same applies to a Suse Studio build really.
Maybe there is a utility for building on usb stick in this fashion rather than from a live dvd/cd.
I can see the attraction of mint - an xfce iso available. No live one that I can find though. Ubuntu also has something too, maybe too light. I have not been able to find anything like these for opensuse.