Just installed Windows 7 and openSUSE 11.3 on my brand new Dell E6410 laptop. Nvidia, 128Gb SSD. Laptop came completely blank - no software installed.
Won’t be using Windows much but had to have it there - “just in case”.
Installed Windows first - on a 20Gb partition - I won’t be storing much personal data! Uses 15Gb including swap. Took about 45mins. Quicker than I thought it would! But when finished, very little actually works! Had some basic video driver but no driver even for the wired network card so no internet access! After much messing about installing drivers, now working but still have some “unknown” devices that have no driver.
Suse installs like a dream in about 30 minutes. Everything works! The Nvidia is currently using nouveau for 2D and nouveau Gallium (7.8.2) for 3D and seems perfectly OK. Was going to install the proprietary drivers but probably no point.
And loads of useful applications ready to go!
Basically there is just no comparison. Wish I had some MS guy sitting next to me just to show how an OS should be! Congrats to all who make this possible.
Happy to hear you are up and running with your dual boot system. I do the same on a couple of systems (one for work, one for home) Avoca. I would say that I seldom give Windows or openSUSE less than 40 GB as a general rule, but whatever works for you. You know that all you need to get those Windows drivers working is to visit:
and look up the Dell E6410 laptop and I am sure everything you need will be there. As for the need to use Windows, just this week I bought a Hard Drive cloning program, that will clone a Linux partition or hard drive, but must be first loaded on a Windows machine. There is an option once installed to create a bootable disk though.
Second, on this very forum, a user posted information about making bootable USB pen drives. But again, while you can load Linux on the pen drive, the program that does the work only runs under Windows.