Thinkpads Forum

Hi everyone,
I am in the process of preparing my R51e for a dual boot installation of XP and OpenSuse 10.1. ( Is it worth it to download 10.2)

I think this will be one of my easiest introduction to Suse, or is it?

My current HD is only 40gb and partitioned 5 GB for XP, 5 GB for Program files and 30GB for misc stuff.

What would be a better set up for me if I was to install Suse as my secondary OS, and if anyone has installed Suse on this machine, have they experiencaced any problems.

Thank you all for your help, sorry this will be my first time to install for dual boot system, and wut makes it harder is that its a system that I am not too familiar with.

You can partition it as you wish but you will need 5 to 10 gig for Suse and probably keep a FAT32 partition to be a "transfer" partition for Windows and Suse since Windows cannot read Linux filesystems. Be sure to install Windows first and Suse last,

Thank you for your prompt response, from what you are saying then i would need about 9GB for my XP partition including my Program files and a 10gb (incuding 2GB Swap) further the linux installation. This leaves me with about 20 GB for shared space. ( Does this have to be Fat or is NTFS ok. I wonder if my disk space is realy adequate for a dual boot .

40gb is mighty small to run SUSE and XP. Id upgrade if I were you.

we have 3 dual-booters:
t22: w2k+debian 3.1: 32GB generous room
x20:w2k+debian 3.1: 20GB generous room
other:XP+debian 3.1: 12GB tight but workable

the smallest disk is partitioned like so:
hda1: 257: linux /
hda2: 2048: XP OS
hda3: 2562: windows programs
hda4: extended partition
hda5: 4658: linux /usr
hda6: 1839: linux /home
hda7: 209: linux /var
hda8: 209: linux swap
NTFS is not used

let us know how you make out

fuligin wrote:Thank you for your prompt response, from what you are saying then i would need about 9GB for my XP partition including my Program files and a 10gb (incuding 2GB Swap) further the linux installation. This leaves me with about 20 GB for shared space. ( Does this have to be Fat or is NTFS ok. I wonder if my disk space is realy adequate for a dual boot .

I wouldn't get under 10 gig on your XP partition. 5 to 10 gig for Suse depending on how much you anticipate using it. Swap size shoud be at least the size of your memory (ram).
The shared space should probably be FAT32 as Linux has trouble writing to NTFS reliably, there are add-ons but FAT32 is more reliable for Linux writing.
You are pushing your disk space pretty hard. I would consider getting a bigger, faster drive so you can give each OS some room to grow. Besides if something goes wrong you can pop the old drive back in and be back up and running.

carbon_unit wrote:You can partition it as you wish but you will need 5 to 10 gig for Suse and probably keep a FAT32 partition to be a "transfer" partition for Windows and Suse since Windows cannot read Linux filesystems. Be sure to install Windows first and Suse last,

A "Common" or transfer partition is likely a good idea for most but I find that I do fine without one. I think whether a person really needs one or not really depends on what they are doing and what their actual setup is.

Linux and Windows can both safely read from each other's partitions, but the last time I checked they weren't able to safely write to each other's discs.

To read from ext2/ext3 from Windows try out http://www.fs-driver.org/. Its an ext2/ext3 IFS driver.

EDIT: Apparently the Windows driver can now Read and Write to both ext2 and ext3 partitions. I haven't tried this yet but it looks like good news.

An important point to remember: all SuSE versions after 10.0 are open source only meaning that if you do not buy the Novell version (SLED), you will NOT get non-open source software. This means NO wireless drivers for any card using the Atheros chipset, no Acrobat, no Flash, no drivers for some proprietary hardware (for example, I am not sure that Bluetooth version 2 will work), no codec for DVD/mpeg/mp3 for media players etc etc. You have to download the software and build/install it for yourself and solve all dependecies along the way. The media players are especially insidious.

These reasons alone have made me stick with 10.0 as I do not need the eye candy in the later versions (XGL etc)

Jedacite wrote:

carbon_unit wrote:You can partition it as you wish but you will need 5 to 10 gig for Suse and probably keep a FAT32 partition to be a "transfer" partition for Windows and Suse since Windows cannot read Linux filesystems. Be sure to install Windows first and Suse last,

A "Common" or transfer partition is likely a good idea for most but I find that I do fine without one. I think whether a person really needs one or not really depends on what they are doing and what their actual setup is.

Linux and Windows can both safely read from each other's partitions, but the last time I checked they weren't able to safely write to each other's discs.



To read from ext2/ext3 from Windows try out http://www.fs-driver.org/. Its an ext2/ext3 IFS driver.

EDIT: Apparently the Windows driver can now Read and Write to both ext2 and ext3 partitions. I haven't tried this yet but it looks like good news.

All linux distros can read/write FAT and FAT32. Most (Fedora/RedHat being the most notable exception) can read NTFS but only some can write to NTFS using proprietary drivers (most are wrappers for the standard Windows NTFS RW drivers).

there is limited ntfs write support with the kernel driver, but using ntfs-3g via fuse will get you full ntfs write support (sans modifying/creating compressed or encrypted files). its been completely reliable for me, and they test it thoroughly before each release.
also check out ntfsprogs, it comes with a variety of tools which enable you to do things like create, clone, resize, or even repair corrupt ntfs partitions. the first thing i did when i got my t60p was shrink the windows ntfs partition, and moved the recovery partition beside it to make room for my linux partitions using these tools via a gparted live cd.

You can also use another networked machine for storage, and it can run Linux or Windows for that.

Or a 1GB or 2GB flash drive is pretty cheap nowadays.

An external hard drive with FAT32 is what I use for HD video files.

CD and DVD discs can transfer files too.

you can skip the swap partition or significantly downsize it.

Depending on what you will be running and how much ram you have, use as little as possible for swap.

I have 1gb ram and no swap, running ubuntu egdy with a gnome desktop.

But if you have 512mb ram I recommend about 300mb swap.