SuSE goes free
- Thread starter Mercutio
- Start date
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Woot! After I just finished downloading and installing the eval version from Novell.
sechs
Storage? I am Storage!
Wow. Who knew that Novell would actually be good for SuSE?
time
Storage? I am Storage!
Just after I paid for Suse 9.3 Pro ...
I don't care, it's still worth it. BTW, I notice 9.3 is finally smart enough to automatically load the Forcedeth driver for the nVidia nForce 4 network adaptor.
I don't care, it's still worth it. BTW, I notice 9.3 is finally smart enough to automatically load the Forcedeth driver for the nVidia nForce 4 network adaptor.
I'm looking at the downloads from the opensuse site and they offer a DVD ISO...but it says "ftp://mirror.colorado.edu/pub/suse/i386/9.3/iso/SUSE-9.3-Eval-DVD.iso". Is this truly the evaluation, or is it good to download and use?
Indiana, Bloomington has the best connection speed that I've found so far... 780 KB p/s sustained so far. 14 minutes to download the 700MB. 
ftp://chuck.ucs.indiana.edu/ (Indiana, Bloomington)
It's listed on the mirror page for folks looking to D/L in the USA.
ftp://chuck.ucs.indiana.edu/ (Indiana, Bloomington)
It's listed on the mirror page for folks looking to D/L in the USA.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
I downloaded the DVD earlier today from San Francisco. Took about 4.5 hours, with the speed ranging from 260 to 340, just barely touching 400 sometimes. :x
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
No idea. I've just downloaded it, didn't even burn it yet. It'll be a few full moons before I get to play with it.
Let me know how VMWW handles it. What version of VMWW are you using (probably 5.0, since EMC owns VMW)? I've been upgrading ever since I bought the full copy of version 2, and am at 4.5.2. I don't use it that much, so didn't upgrade to 5.0. I couldn't get SuSe 9.2 to install in VMWW.
Let me know how VMWW handles it. What version of VMWW are you using (probably 5.0, since EMC owns VMW)? I've been upgrading ever since I bought the full copy of version 2, and am at 4.5.2. I don't use it that much, so didn't upgrade to 5.0. I couldn't get SuSe 9.2 to install in VMWW.
So far vmware workstation 5.0 is handling it just fine. I obtained my copy for free because I attended a seminar for the product. Everyone who attended obtained a free legal copy of workstation 5.0 as part of the promotion. In addition, I do get to use it at work because emc now owns them, but I do have my own personal copy to play with at home.
Here are some pictures of the SuSe 9.3 install:
http://www.handruin.com/link_img/vmws5/
VMware claims 5.0 is faster than 4.x, but I have no hard data to confirm that claim, so I'd still take it as marketing propaganda. I've also never used version 4.x, so I don't know if it's faster. So far I was able to install fedora core 4, and linspire with no problems. I haven't tried SuSe 9.2, but I could if you want me to see if WS5 is more compatible. So far the only thing it wasn't able to install was smoothwall. I wanted to try smoothwall without reformatting my other machine, so I figured I could install it in VMware...didn't work, couldn't find the hard drive.
Here are some pictures of the SuSe 9.3 install:
http://www.handruin.com/link_img/vmws5/
VMware claims 5.0 is faster than 4.x, but I have no hard data to confirm that claim, so I'd still take it as marketing propaganda. I've also never used version 4.x, so I don't know if it's faster. So far I was able to install fedora core 4, and linspire with no problems. I haven't tried SuSe 9.2, but I could if you want me to see if WS5 is more compatible. So far the only thing it wasn't able to install was smoothwall. I wanted to try smoothwall without reformatting my other machine, so I figured I could install it in VMware...didn't work, couldn't find the hard drive.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Thanks for the info, Handy, appreciate it. As for 9.2, no, don't bother; it would be a waste of time. When I have time I'll try 9.3 on VMWW 4.5 and see what happens. I'll post back here eventually
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Okay, I've downloaded and installed Suse 9.3. I really like the GUI that setup up with YaST, especially when combined with YOU. Without having played with much of the accessories, I'm not happy with some of the fonts. They're horribly small in Firefox, making it very difficult to read text on this website and others (including my own). I also didn't like that Suse was on the verge of taking a dump when trying to setup my old 15" Gateway 2000 Vivitron monitor. It labeled it as a standard VESA monitor, and it did not have the appropriate model within its HCL. I just avoided this warning first time around, and Suse would refuse to boot into KDE, it would just give me the command line. During the second installation, I told Suse that I'm using a Gateway 500 monitor, and seems okay. All of the other standard hardware, such as the Intel i915G chipset and it's onboard stuff were detected correctly, which is a big plus. However, it didn't detect my 1394 adapter card. Let me see how other things work.
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Konqueror does a better job rendering fonts and font sizes. But it still looks better in Windows.
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
I think I'll try some CD burning with SuSe 9.3 and then move on to Novell's stuff.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I find the fonts in the default GNONE environment somewhat nicer, if that is at all helpful.
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Thanks for the tip. K3b does a great job of burning image files to CDs.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
10.0 is out; I'm downloading now (sheesh, 9.3 came out just a few months ago?). The "Eval" does not time out.
The list of mirrors is here.
The list of mirrors is here.
Yes things are a lot clearer now...however, there is still a lot of confusion, as is evidenced in the mailing list (top one), and logical discrepencies are often brought to light.mubs said:
Incidently, an "official" forum will have to remain on the back burner for now...long live the chaos of a mailing list!
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
Bad doggie!
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
Shouldn't it be: bad Santos L. Helper!
Buck
Storage? I am Storage!
Mubs, please let us know your impression of 10 in comparison to 9.3.
mubs
Storage? I am Storage!
I'm not going to be of much help, Buck, CityK is a shining beacon of light compared to me as far as Linux is concerned. Though I have an older spare machine that could run a modern OS reasonably well, for various reasons I end up trying it in VMWare, having compatibility problems, and giving up. I got off the VMWare upgrade treadmill a while back, and my version does not handle newer releases well.
I'll try to install it on the spare m/c one of these days. My feedback will practically be useless; I wouldn't even know if what I'm looking at is good or bad.
On a side note, my broadband speeds are frustrating as hell. Adelphia has been out a few times, and the techs can't figure out what's wrong. Ranges from 28 Kb to 2400 Kb, depending on day and time of day. My diownload speed is supposed to be 3 Mb. Unfortunately the only alternative here is dial-up. That SuSe DVD download is taking forever.
I'll try to install it on the spare m/c one of these days. My feedback will practically be useless; I wouldn't even know if what I'm looking at is good or bad.
On a side note, my broadband speeds are frustrating as hell. Adelphia has been out a few times, and the techs can't figure out what's wrong. Ranges from 28 Kb to 2400 Kb, depending on day and time of day. My diownload speed is supposed to be 3 Mb. Unfortunately the only alternative here is dial-up. That SuSe DVD download is taking forever.
I'll try it out when I get home. However, my impressions will be useless. I, too, do not know what to look for in the different releases. At best, I could go through the change log and make note on those items.
The only reason I want to upgrade is to learn more about SuSe. Otherwise my 9.3 setup has been working almost perfect (with the small exception of my hard drive LED staying on all the time).
I, too, do not know what to look for in the different releases. At best, I could go through the change log and make note on those items.The only reason I want to upgrade is to learn more about SuSe. Otherwise my 9.3 setup has been working almost perfect (with the small exception of my hard drive LED staying on all the time).
Might I suggest you take a spin with the Live version first then? -- its only a 1.1GB d/l and works well (or a least didn't present anything the Yast Control thing-a-ma-ka-bobber couldn't fix) ... plus its easy to see what the different desktop environments are like (KDE, Gnome, the misc lightweights):
http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/downloads/ftp/mirrors_isos.html#americas
http://www.novell.com/products/suselinux/downloads/ftp/mirrors_isos.html#americas
The Suse 10.0 LiveDVD
It is very good .... but not without posing challenges and distractors from the end user experience.
For example, as I alluded to up above, my soundcard (integrated Realtek AC) and network card (integrated Realtek) are not detected by default by the Live disc. Running Yast resolves this easily enough though. I have no idea what mini-hurdles other users might encounter.
This next point is perhaps both a blessing and a bane - Unlike Knoppix which mounts your hdd's partitions from the get go, the Suse Live disc is completely hands off out of the gate. Eager to test some of my data files out with the Linux application suites (and by this I mean read access), I proceeded to mount the partitions (all Winders NTFS). Strangely, all the mount command voodoo I tried (and you have to log in under root to do this) didn't work. A quick google search did, however, turn up the solution. But this would no doubt be a source of frustration for a new user. .... as a side note, I also wanted to test out writing to one of these NTFS partitions (one that contained no meaningful data in case of journaling disaster), but even as root access was denied, so I'm not certain what finer detail I'm missing. But not a great concern.
A second shortcoming of the Live disc, in comparison to say Knoppix, is that Suse does not bundle much in the way of mutimedia codecs. Don't expect your mp3s or mpeg videos to play. This is the same situation with the Suse 10.0 OSS that you install to your hdd (although if you purchase the commercial Suse 10.0 most stuff will in fact be bundled into the distribution and media players will not be cut down like they are with the OSS version). This point I'll address further in part two, but I'll remark here that it is discouraging that the tester, unless they know what they are doing, is not going to glimpse a more full featured desktop.
Anyways, in many respects I did indeed like the Live Suse offering better then the former Knoppix LiveCDs that I've test driven. But the shortcomings above are probably enough to make some potential adopters or Windows converts turn away. Perhaps the point here is that if you want to have a looksee at the general layout of Suse is without touching your hdd's, then give it a go. One real bonus is the ease with which you can sample the KDE, Gnome and misc other desktop envirnments. So go ahead, give it a whirl.
Suse 10.1 alpha 2 x86-64t
My adventure starts with the fact that I don't have any blank cd-r's available (nor really want to purchase any right now). I do have one 700 RW and several 650 RWs. Not enough. I bid anything for the Caramilk secret. Anything? Luckly, however, I also have several empty +RWs hanging around too. These did the trick, but not before I tried to create my own DVD ISO of the CD ISOs -- instructions from doing it in Linux are here ... I followed the manual procedure (adopting it to my particlulars), from within Windows and then tried the last part (package _descrip_) from the Suse LiveDVD. In theory I should have been successful, but I suspect I was being thwarted by evil gremlins that live inside my root userspace...they mostly come at night...mostly. Alas, I abandoned this to make use of the +RWs, which ended up being a blessing in disguise -- DVD has a much faster spin rate then CD, and as such, my DVD installation CDs were plenty fast....(I actually used the one 700 RW and one 650 RW and 3 +RWs...the speed difference between the DVDs and the CDs while installing was very noticable).
Now, I'm not certain why all Suse versions by default recommend such a simple partitioning scheme (/swap and / ), as it seems a little silly and not conducive to ease of upgrades etc. (I subscribe to the multi-partition school of though....although my info might be out of date). Changing that is easy enough (given that the Yast installer is really nice). The problem is that I'm not familar enough with package requirements and what goes where --- thus I had to go through the step of creating /carving out partitions about four times before I had a setup that would work ( I finally clued in on the graphical display, bottom left on the software selection page on the third try and honed it down on the fourth) with the software selection.....perhaps this is why Suse recommends the two partition setup in the first place
Anyways, more on the software selection -- for whatever reason, a default package recommendation is borked on alpha 2 and you have to do a manual selection. Ummm, given that I have enough difficulty with the names of Linux software to begin with (many suites look to me like they were named after Towns in Finland), and coupled with the fact that I really didn't feel like going through each and every selection (if I was getting paid by the hour I would have had no objection to have done this), it should be clear that I went in way over my head (the 64-bit portion was like adding a few sharks into the mix while I was at it). So, it should be no surprise that my selections ended up with a Dependencies Conflicts Warning From Hell. Being an absolute expert at this kind of stuff, I reasoned that the real culprits were likely conflicts between Kmart, Kerr-mcgee, Kraft and Gnomics. So, in short, I did my best (actually spending more time then I probably should have) to try to resolve this and proceeded with the install.....which didn't go too well.
Shortly into the install proceeding I was booted out of Yast to a blue screen with a cmdline - which was obviously the basic kernel environment loaded by the CD to get the installation going. Apparently Yast didn't agree with my selections, picked up its soccer ball and went home....or something like that. I can't remember what option the cmdline gave me but I was able to jump right back into the Yast installer again...but from the position of square one.
At this point I decided I would surrender to the default partitioning recommendation. As for package selection, I tried to be a little more careful this time around. Dependency conflicts again occured, and once again I either removed the offenders and conflicts as best as my unknowledgable ability would take me. Apparently, I did a good enough job this time as installation proceeded without a hitch.
One complaint about the installation is that after the first installation disk is finished, you have to reboot, but prior to rebooting it doesn't mention to remove the disk from the rom drive --- the problem here, and one that I can foresee tripping up novices, is that this first installation disc still in your drive is a boot disk! So, upon rebooting the system, you actually end up booting off the installation disc, which drops you to the default installation screen - by default its first selection is boot from hard disk (which is what you want to do) but those unwitting about the whole situation might be tempted to chose the installation option (which is the second option , and is intuitively what a novice may think they are doing). I suspect selection of this second option would be entirely counter productive to continuing installation you've already started .... in otherwords, if you like driving in circles, select install, if not, and you want to continue with your installation, select boot from hard drive. Just a thought, but its something Suse should look at to clear up.
Okay, where was I, awe yes, package installation succeeded and setting up hardware, passwords and users proceeded. There were a few oddities here, but I can't remember them except for the firewall being by default disabled (why, I'm not sure). Anyways, after making my corrections and entering my CityK alter ego user information, I was told I could now log in to use my new installation. Off to the races! .... or so I thought.
The KDE start up screen came up, then a blank sreen with a mouse cursur .... and as I waited for my desktop to appear, I though to myself, man its taking a long time,
So he paused. And the CityK put a hand to his ear.
And he did hear a sound rising over the CPU fan.
It started in low. Then it started to grow...
He stared down at his computer!
The CityK popped his eyes!
Then he shook!
What he saw was a shocking surprise!
Every harddrive access, the tall and the small,
Was repeating! He HADN'T installed Linux at all!
And the CityK stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?
It installed without ribbons! It installed without tags!
"It installed without packages, boxes or antistatic bags!"
And he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then the CityK thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Linux," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.
"Maybe Linux...perhaps...takes a little bit more!"
And what happened then...?
Well, I backed down the bleeding edge route and installed Suse 10.0 OSS (with success no less!). I'll pick up part 2 of the Suse Journeyman blog later. As an aid for me to remember, a couple of points (and likely many more) I'll dwell upon are:
- cool machine
- on KDE
- passwords
- multimedia, flash crap etc
- firefox fonts and cleartype
- kernal headers
- harddrive accesses
It is very good .... but not without posing challenges and distractors from the end user experience.
For example, as I alluded to up above, my soundcard (integrated Realtek AC) and network card (integrated Realtek) are not detected by default by the Live disc. Running Yast resolves this easily enough though. I have no idea what mini-hurdles other users might encounter.
This next point is perhaps both a blessing and a bane - Unlike Knoppix which mounts your hdd's partitions from the get go, the Suse Live disc is completely hands off out of the gate. Eager to test some of my data files out with the Linux application suites (and by this I mean read access), I proceeded to mount the partitions (all Winders NTFS). Strangely, all the mount command voodoo I tried (and you have to log in under root to do this) didn't work. A quick google search did, however, turn up the solution. But this would no doubt be a source of frustration for a new user. .... as a side note, I also wanted to test out writing to one of these NTFS partitions (one that contained no meaningful data in case of journaling disaster), but even as root access was denied, so I'm not certain what finer detail I'm missing. But not a great concern.
A second shortcoming of the Live disc, in comparison to say Knoppix, is that Suse does not bundle much in the way of mutimedia codecs. Don't expect your mp3s or mpeg videos to play. This is the same situation with the Suse 10.0 OSS that you install to your hdd (although if you purchase the commercial Suse 10.0 most stuff will in fact be bundled into the distribution and media players will not be cut down like they are with the OSS version). This point I'll address further in part two, but I'll remark here that it is discouraging that the tester, unless they know what they are doing, is not going to glimpse a more full featured desktop.
Anyways, in many respects I did indeed like the Live Suse offering better then the former Knoppix LiveCDs that I've test driven. But the shortcomings above are probably enough to make some potential adopters or Windows converts turn away. Perhaps the point here is that if you want to have a looksee at the general layout of Suse is without touching your hdd's, then give it a go. One real bonus is the ease with which you can sample the KDE, Gnome and misc other desktop envirnments. So go ahead, give it a whirl.
Suse 10.1 alpha 2 x86-64t
My adventure starts with the fact that I don't have any blank cd-r's available (nor really want to purchase any right now). I do have one 700 RW and several 650 RWs. Not enough. I bid anything for the Caramilk secret. Anything? Luckly, however, I also have several empty +RWs hanging around too. These did the trick, but not before I tried to create my own DVD ISO of the CD ISOs -- instructions from doing it in Linux are here ... I followed the manual procedure (adopting it to my particlulars), from within Windows and then tried the last part (package _descrip_) from the Suse LiveDVD. In theory I should have been successful, but I suspect I was being thwarted by evil gremlins that live inside my root userspace...they mostly come at night...mostly. Alas, I abandoned this to make use of the +RWs, which ended up being a blessing in disguise -- DVD has a much faster spin rate then CD, and as such, my DVD installation CDs were plenty fast....(I actually used the one 700 RW and one 650 RW and 3 +RWs...the speed difference between the DVDs and the CDs while installing was very noticable).
Now, I'm not certain why all Suse versions by default recommend such a simple partitioning scheme (/swap and / ), as it seems a little silly and not conducive to ease of upgrades etc. (I subscribe to the multi-partition school of though....although my info might be out of date). Changing that is easy enough (given that the Yast installer is really nice). The problem is that I'm not familar enough with package requirements and what goes where --- thus I had to go through the step of creating /carving out partitions about four times before I had a setup that would work ( I finally clued in on the graphical display, bottom left on the software selection page on the third try and honed it down on the fourth) with the software selection.....perhaps this is why Suse recommends the two partition setup in the first place
Anyways, more on the software selection -- for whatever reason, a default package recommendation is borked on alpha 2 and you have to do a manual selection. Ummm, given that I have enough difficulty with the names of Linux software to begin with (many suites look to me like they were named after Towns in Finland), and coupled with the fact that I really didn't feel like going through each and every selection (if I was getting paid by the hour I would have had no objection to have done this), it should be clear that I went in way over my head (the 64-bit portion was like adding a few sharks into the mix while I was at it). So, it should be no surprise that my selections ended up with a Dependencies Conflicts Warning From Hell. Being an absolute expert at this kind of stuff, I reasoned that the real culprits were likely conflicts between Kmart, Kerr-mcgee, Kraft and Gnomics. So, in short, I did my best (actually spending more time then I probably should have) to try to resolve this and proceeded with the install.....which didn't go too well.
Shortly into the install proceeding I was booted out of Yast to a blue screen with a cmdline - which was obviously the basic kernel environment loaded by the CD to get the installation going. Apparently Yast didn't agree with my selections, picked up its soccer ball and went home....or something like that. I can't remember what option the cmdline gave me but I was able to jump right back into the Yast installer again...but from the position of square one.
At this point I decided I would surrender to the default partitioning recommendation. As for package selection, I tried to be a little more careful this time around. Dependency conflicts again occured, and once again I either removed the offenders and conflicts as best as my unknowledgable ability would take me. Apparently, I did a good enough job this time as installation proceeded without a hitch.
One complaint about the installation is that after the first installation disk is finished, you have to reboot, but prior to rebooting it doesn't mention to remove the disk from the rom drive --- the problem here, and one that I can foresee tripping up novices, is that this first installation disc still in your drive is a boot disk! So, upon rebooting the system, you actually end up booting off the installation disc, which drops you to the default installation screen - by default its first selection is boot from hard disk (which is what you want to do) but those unwitting about the whole situation might be tempted to chose the installation option (which is the second option , and is intuitively what a novice may think they are doing). I suspect selection of this second option would be entirely counter productive to continuing installation you've already started .... in otherwords, if you like driving in circles, select install, if not, and you want to continue with your installation, select boot from hard drive. Just a thought, but its something Suse should look at to clear up.
Okay, where was I, awe yes, package installation succeeded and setting up hardware, passwords and users proceeded. There were a few oddities here, but I can't remember them except for the firewall being by default disabled (why, I'm not sure). Anyways, after making my corrections and entering my CityK alter ego user information, I was told I could now log in to use my new installation. Off to the races! .... or so I thought.
The KDE start up screen came up, then a blank sreen with a mouse cursur .... and as I waited for my desktop to appear, I though to myself, man its taking a long time,
So he paused. And the CityK put a hand to his ear.
And he did hear a sound rising over the CPU fan.
It started in low. Then it started to grow...
He stared down at his computer!
The CityK popped his eyes!
Then he shook!
What he saw was a shocking surprise!
Every harddrive access, the tall and the small,
Was repeating! He HADN'T installed Linux at all!
And the CityK stood puzzling and puzzling: "How could it be so?
It installed without ribbons! It installed without tags!
"It installed without packages, boxes or antistatic bags!"
And he puzzled three hours, `till his puzzler was sore.
Then the CityK thought of something he hadn't before!
"Maybe Linux," he thought, "doesn't come from a store.
"Maybe Linux...perhaps...takes a little bit more!"
And what happened then...?
Well, I backed down the bleeding edge route and installed Suse 10.0 OSS (with success no less!). I'll pick up part 2 of the Suse Journeyman blog later. As an aid for me to remember, a couple of points (and likely many more) I'll dwell upon are:
- cool machine
- on KDE
- passwords
- multimedia, flash crap etc
- firefox fonts and cleartype
- kernal headers
- harddrive accesses
Adcadet
Storage Freak
I'm a linux newbie and I'm running SuSE 10.0 OSS x64 along with Windows. Depending on what I'm doing, I use either for most things.
Issues I've had/fixed:
- Dual monitors were not detected out the gate, but the ATi drivers gave me a nice dual-screen without problem
- mouting, reading, writing NTFS hard drives remains a challenge.
- mouse support (MS Intellimouse Explorer) is so-so. I poked and prodded and got my scroll wheel to work, but my forward/back buttons remain non-functional.
Issues I've had/fixed:
- Dual monitors were not detected out the gate, but the ATi drivers gave me a nice dual-screen without problem
- mouting, reading, writing NTFS hard drives remains a challenge.
- mouse support (MS Intellimouse Explorer) is so-so. I poked and prodded and got my scroll wheel to work, but my forward/back buttons remain non-functional.
Adcadet
Storage Freak
Oh, another issue:
- networking. A few years ago Mandrake set up networking without a hitch out of the box; SuSE 10 has not, even after I tried to set it up a little.
- networking. A few years ago Mandrake set up networking without a hitch out of the box; SuSE 10 has not, even after I tried to set it up a little.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
That's what has always most pissed me off when I've tried any Linux distro. My logitech mices have never had functional fwd/back buttons. That's the most annoying missing feature of Linux.Adcadet said:
CityK said:
Unless something has changed in the past 3 years that I haven't heard about...
Write capacity for NTFS shares is experimental, and has been that way for a while. You would probably need to build a custom kernel with an obscure patch to enable it. And then you'd be toying with fire.
Reading works though. I've never needed it (no Windows, no NTFS), but it doesn't surprise me you have to go through a few hoops to enable it. Personally I'm still impressed. The ability to read NTFS alone was a heck of an accomplishment when it first became possible (I forget when now ... it's been a few years).
time
Storage? I am Storage!
Poor baby.CougTek said:
I absolutely, positively refuse to use a mouse with more than three buttons - like at least 95% of computer users. Just get over it.As for CityK's "review" ...
Alpha and demo software - for Christ's sake ...The fact is, Suse has better hardware driver support than any version of Windows. Production versions are a dream to install - compared to other versions of Linux, let alone Windblows.
Disclaimer: this post is watered down, except for the vicious attack on CougTek - which I figure he can handle. So there!
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
By default, the SuSE firewall blocks the ports used by Windows SMB networking. I don't know if that's what anyone is complaining about when they say SuSE doesn't set up networking, but if you want to connect to Windows machines you can either turn off the firewall (you all have routers, right?) that's installed by default or unblock TCP & UDP ports 137 - 139.
As I said in another thread, Linux doesn't write to NTFS by default because it has no way of reading the Access Control Lists associated with any file in the filesystem. If you turn on NTFS write support (it's a kernel option) and start writing to an NTFS volume, you are taking the risk of hosing important data, or at the very least compromising security on your Windows install.
As far as partitioning... I recommend giving yourself a substantial amount of space for /home on its own partition. Personally, I also put /var on its own partition, simply because I'm an ass and leave my mail spool there (it's an old habit), and because I like to keep old log files. Finally, I always create at least a mount point, if not a partition, called /pub as a place to put samba and NFS-shared directories.
SuSE's installer generally does a pretty good job of fixing dependency problems, but for the most part, I just install everything anyway (except vile, vile emacs, which I do not allow on my computers), reasoning that there's probably several hundred MB of crap in a Windows install that I don't use as well.
Installing SuSE DOES NOT always require a reboot. The classroom machines I'm using right now go straight from the installer to a clean KDE desktop. No reboots at all. I've seen other machines do that, and you're right that it's confusing, but it doesn't always happen.
As I said in another thread, Linux doesn't write to NTFS by default because it has no way of reading the Access Control Lists associated with any file in the filesystem. If you turn on NTFS write support (it's a kernel option) and start writing to an NTFS volume, you are taking the risk of hosing important data, or at the very least compromising security on your Windows install.
As far as partitioning... I recommend giving yourself a substantial amount of space for /home on its own partition. Personally, I also put /var on its own partition, simply because I'm an ass and leave my mail spool there (it's an old habit), and because I like to keep old log files. Finally, I always create at least a mount point, if not a partition, called /pub as a place to put samba and NFS-shared directories.
SuSE's installer generally does a pretty good job of fixing dependency problems, but for the most part, I just install everything anyway (except vile, vile emacs, which I do not allow on my computers), reasoning that there's probably several hundred MB of crap in a Windows install that I don't use as well.
Installing SuSE DOES NOT always require a reboot. The classroom machines I'm using right now go straight from the installer to a clean KDE desktop. No reboots at all. I've seen other machines do that, and you're right that it's confusing, but it doesn't always happen.