openSUSE Installation, DVD vs. LiveCD
Over the holidays I put a larger disk drive in my Lifebook S2110 (AMD/ATI) laptop, and reinstalled everything from scratch. I added several more Linux distributions (it now multi-boots Windows XP Professional, Ubuntu, Mandriva, PCLinuxOS, openSUSE and Fedora). I installed openSUSE 11.1 from the DVD distribution, rather than the LiveCD as I had done before. There are a few significant differences:
- The DVD contains both Gnome and KDE desktops, so you can choose between them during installation.
- After installation, the main software repository will be set to be the DVD, so if you later want to install additional packages, it will look there first - or at least try to. If you still want to pick up any new packages from the main online openSUSE OSS repo, you have to add the appropriate line to the Software Repositories list.
- You can not simply boot and run openSUSE from the DVD in the way that you can from the LiveCD, so if your intent is to just try openSUSE and see if you like it, without actually installing it, you must use one of the LiveCD distributions.
Beyond these few differences, the installation is the same.
By the way, openSUSE installed and runs extremely well on the laptop with AMD CPU, ATI graphic card, Broadcom wired network adapter and Atheros wireless network adapter. Everything else that I typically install (Sun Java, Adobe Flash, Mozilla Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Citrix ICA Web Client, Opera, Gizmo5, mySQL, QT4 and more) was either already installed in the base system, or installed without a hitch.
jw 5/1/2009