home

Well, I guess the versionitis virus finally caught me despite all good intentions. I had to install SUSE 10. Since I did not want to waste a CD I opted for the CD-less installation. Read on if you are interested.

Get the boot.iso

First things first. You need to download your boot iso. Pick a mirror of your choice and download it ([1] and [2]). The boot iso is rather small, about 64MB.

Get to Know Your Machine

Before you go ahead and install a new system, take some time to get some information about your machine. Make sure you write down the layout of your hard drive(s), it’ll help preventing accidental formatting of partitions. Make a note about your network card, and other important parts of you computer. You might have to load the one or other kernel module manually. And don’t forget to *backup* your important files. This could be all your personal documents, desktop settings, and probably some other stuff you modified over the time. If you have a database server running, don’t forget your databases.

Prepare Your Machine

The next step is to prepare your machine so it will start with the new boot.iso. The OpenSUSE site has a good guide to help you out here [3]. Read this document, or go directly to the Installation without CD guide [4].

After you downloaded the iso image, copy it into your boot directory. You need to do that as root. Then do the following:

mount -t iso9660 -o loop boot.iso /mnt
cp /mnt/boot/loader/initrd /boot/suseinitrd
cp /mnt/boot/loader/linux /boot/suselinux
umount /mnt

Now you need to update your boot loader. I use Grub, so my entry looked as follows:

title Install SUSE
root (hd0,6)
kernel /boot/suselinux
initrd /boot/suseinitrd

You will have to adjust the root settings according to your drive setup! Before you do that write down the IP address of the mirror you plan on using and write down the directory. You will find mirrors under [2].

The Installation

In order to install your new system, you need to reboot. Chose the new option ‘Install SUSE’. It will load the new boot image. The next steps will be textbased.

The first thing the process will tell you is: Make sure that CD number 1 is in your computer. Simply press OK, although you don’t have a CD in your drive. Select the manual setup and off you go. You will now select your language and keyboard settings. With the next step you let the system know what you want: Start installation or System. And since this is a network installation, you will then select the protocol. In my case it was ftp.

At this point I got the message that no network interface was loaded, so I had to do this manually. Go back in the menu to the point where you can load kernel modules manually, chose network adapters, and then select the appropriate module. After you did this, go back in the menu and select again the installation part. After selecting ftp, the system will start the network and will ask if it can use DHCP. For simplicity I agreed. Now you will have to enter the IP address of the mirror and the directory. Once you did that, the system will start to load the installation system. This can take some time, although this is not such a big file (65750 KB).

Eventually you will be greeted with a graphical installation system, similar to previous SUSE installation screens. After answering some questions from the system, I made the choice to do a fresh install. You will be able to select your timezone and make changes, then you select your desktop environment. Since I like KDE, that’s what I selected.

The system will now create an Installation Summary and you will be able to change it to your needs. Be aware though, the package evaluation can take a while. After you made all your choices, the installation will start. Since everything has to be downloaded it will be a while until you can boot your new system for the first time.

Note: Be aware that if you choose more than one language, you will download the extra language files, which will add some megabites to your total download. I didn’t really think about this when I selected to add German as a secondary language.

After everything is installed the system will reboot. Now you can setup your root password, any users you might want to add, and fiddle with the hardware settings. All in the well known way. No surprises here. Everything worked just fine.

Impressions

My system has several partitions. One is a Dell tools thing, very small and a leftover from the first days. Two are partitions for data only, one is the root partition and one is swap. The system recognized the root and swap partition and only set those to be formatted. Something I found to be quite neat. I did set mountpoints for my to data partitions and I also set the small Dell partition to be the boot area (formatted with ext2), but that was all the change I made.

After the system started I logged into the KDE desktop. Nothing spectacular to be expected here of course, but everything seems to be a bit faster, more responsive. Applications don’t take that long until they start, which is nice, since my laptop is not the fastest in the first place and every bit of improvement helps.

Setting up my wireless lan was also a piece of cake. I followed my own instructions [5] (ndiswrapper) and was done in about 5 minutes.

USB: The new system works fine, at least with my LG stick. The mounting happens much quicker, and a popup window shows up and asks if it should open the new location. Nice feature, but some may not like it.

Conclusions

OpenSUSE seems to be a nice distribution. So far all is dandy. Was it really necessary to upgrade? No. But the little improvements (HAL, better response time etc) make it worthwhile.

What I always liked about SUSE is that things just work. I actually installed Kubuntu (5.10) just before I ended up installing OpenSUSE, I thought it might be nice to try something else. The installation went smooth, the hardware was recognized. There was one showstopper though. I could not get my laptop screen set up the way I wanted. Kubuntu only allowed 640×480 px! The same thing happened with an Ubuntu Live-CD a short while back. Even changing the X config files manually didn’t help. Needless to say I didn’t feel like digging around for hours to find a solution. So, back to SUSE.

Since the entire installation was done via ftp it seemed to take forever. So if your are in a rush or on a slow connection, don’t do it. Try to get a hand on a CD set or a DVD.

Resources

[1] Download SUSE 10
[2] Mirrors Released Version
[3] Installation Help
[4] Installation without CD
[5] sjmk|dot|net - Wireless