I am about to install SuSe as of now, and it is currently installing it. But i am not so shure / happy with what i did. My question is in regard to the installation process and setting up the partition.

I have 4 partitions on my 100GB HDD. 40 / 20 / 20 / 20.
C: 40 - Windows , D: 20 - BLANK , E: 20 - BLANK , F: 20 - BLANK.

While i got into the installation, SuSe prompted me with a proposal and i quiet didnt understand most of what was written. I went to the Documents section on SuSe but they dont have much on partitions. I went into the advanced options and saw all my partitions listed. Everything seemed to look fine there. Now D: was NTFS and i had to reformat it to linux system, which i did. I changed the format to "reis" something and changed the mount point from d/windows to / . after i hit done .. They asked to set SWAP but i did not .. and returned to the main screen of partitions .. i saw 4 changes to be made out of which 1 was in red (format partition to linux) and the rest were sumthing about mounting to /windows in all the drives ..

I duno what wrong have i done .. but everything has a first time and so be it, its installing ..
Could anyone be kind enough to guide me step wise on installation of SuSe on my D: drive ? setting up the necessary preferences etc.

Regards
Dhanesh.

Ok .. its done .. and i think it went fine. I get a Gnome boot select screen at startup .. and when i select windows and get in, i can see drives .. C: , E: , F: ..

D: drive does not seem to be shown, i am guessing that its because of the Linux format.

I went ahead and plugged in my LAN cable, and played around with a few settings, but finally got the Internet to work. So now i can browse pages .. woohooo. Aight , not so happy yet because i was playing around more and i got into gaim, when i start it up i set a yahoo account and when i try to login it shows me a box that says New Keyring Password. I dont know whats that but i am not able to put a pasword in nor click on anything around the desktop. Its like a system hang .. .. err .. Isnt there sumthing to force quit running programs in linux ? ..

Ok well i checked the HDD, and it was running full atleast for 5 mins .. then when i unplugged the LAN cable, the HDD light went off and now the system is still un-clickable ..

What could be the problem here ?


Regards
Dhanesh.

P.S. A very stupid question after knowing that if 2 partition formats dont see each other. But is it possible to view my shared folders on my Desktop ? as in where do i type in the \\192.168.0.1 ? i went to run but guess its used to run applications.

In Linux, you need a swap partition or else it WILL NOT work to its full potential. It's just like your virtual memory on Windows.

In KDE, the default CTRL+ALT+DELTE is CTRL+ESC. However, you can change it later. The password keyring is a software that KDE or Mozilla keeps your passwords to.

xboxrulz

I'm afraid you did it the wrong way, at least the most difficult way.
Your hard disk was fully partitionned before you started installing Linux, which is bad for a beginner.
You started with C: 40 - Windows , D: 20 - BLANK , E: 20 - BLANK , F: 20 - BLANK.
I guess "BLANK" means a Windows partition with no data.
If you have to restart it on another computer or if you fully erase this one before re-installing windows, start almust the same way, but with
C: 40 - Windows , D: 20 - BLANK , E: 20 - BLANK , and no F: disk, but 20 Gig unporationned space on your hard disk.
Then, the SUZE installer will create some partitions in the remaining unpartitionned space, probably 10 gig for the Unix / filesystem-partion, 4 gig for the swap partition, and 6 gig for the /home partition.

By the way, I know that gaim causes system hang-ups if not correctly configured, actively searching things related to the Ethernet cable makes the system retry too often and not give system time for your fingers on the keyboard.

usually I try to avoid GAIM, because it uses GTK+ and plus, it does cause some hang ups, I recommend using Kopete instead:

http://kopete.kde.org


xboxrulz

You don't neccessarily need a swap partition if you have enough RAM to cover all the programs you'd expect to run at the same time, including the Operating System. 512MB would be my minimum recommendation, but the more the merrier.

For KDE there's KSysGuard (terminal: ksysguard) or KTop, not sure whether these are installed with KDE or they were optional choices.

For Gnome there's System Monitor (terminal: gnome-system-monitor)

These are both graphical user interfaces that are similar to Windows task manager, where you can end/kill running tasks.

If the system has become unstabled but hasn't locked up, you can possibly drop into terminal by pressing:



Login and then you can run commandline tools like:



Read the instructions for these by doing:


or


Where "programname" is the program you want more information on. You'll definitely want to pass arguments for those programs.

I prefer "ps" and here's how I execute the command to display the information I would need:



Then I would juse use the "kill" command to terminate the programs, which I'll show below how to do.

If I know the program name then I would probably just do:



Where PID is the id's returned from running "pgrep" (there can be more than 1 PID, so you may need to kill a few). If nothing shows, the program you were looking for isn't running.

So when you've finished ending the program, "exit" back to the login prompt then press:



and you should return to your desktop, and hopefully the program has been removed.

To access shares, you first need to configure the Samba Host/Client, This process has been made quite easy to do, though you should look up a way to do it under SuSe but if you run into any trouble, you know where to ask.

Test this out first though, you might be able to avoid the setup procedure:

In terminal:


Where "sharename" is the name of what you called the shared directory. Passing the -U argument allows you to specify a username, and possibly prompt for password if password protected.

Your "D" drive is hidden, though Windows can still tell you it's there by viewing it's partition layout (Admin Tools, Comp Management, Disk Drive Management). File System drivers can sometimes allow you to read Linux partitions from Windows, though not the safests thing to do.

Key Ring Manager, is a program for keeping your passwords stored safely on your computer, while being able to remember them for programs you use.

I'm not sure if I've answered, everything, and sorry for having the information all over the place. If I did miss something, hopefully you can clearly say what it is, what you're doing, what programs, etc.

Cheers,

MC

However, having a SWAP partition is highly recommended. Especially if you're doing heavy duty apps like compilation and gameplay. I slapped on a 2.4 GB swap drive w/ 512MB physical memory (Processor: Pentium 4 2533 MHz)

It's still hell slow.

xboxrulz

This post has been edited by xboxrulz: Sep 2 2006, 07:50 PM

xboxrulz .. mastercomputers .. yordan .. bow to thee lol

aight, getting back to the topic one by one. Yordan, you and xboxrulez mentioned to keep a swap but with 1GB ram do i really need it ? ok well m not in a state to ask stupid questions like these nor do i have any choices cause m still a learner so maybe i'll just keep a swap. Infact i think this is what i'll do.

Get into windows, use partition magic .. Format D: and change it to Linux Ext2 (am i right about this ?), so now windows wont show D: at all ? then i pop in the SuSe install DVD and when the partition option comes up .. i would be shure that suse chooses the linux partition to install everything including swap etc ? (would it be necessary to just leave it un-partitioned instead of changin it to Linux Ext2 ? .. so linux would do what it has to on that unpartitiond space) .. could you tell me how approx it would show up on the partition option screen, lol cause frankly its all greek to me untill i go into advanced and see the partitions listed with drive letters and space. The "reisf" i dont remember sorry for my bad memory, this word keeps showing up after the partition listed, is it a suse default file system ?

Too many questions and all mixed up ! sorry guys .. m trying to make it get into one post as possible.

Ok , now about the Gnome and GAIM part, well i use Gnome xboxrulz hope thats not a problem because after reading reviews on a few sites plus asta .. its hard for me to decide which one to choose so after taking the "friendly for begginer" tip of gnome plus seeing it come installed with firefox i thought of going with it . I am still playing around with the OS and looking around AND screwing up most of the things, believe me its not a pretty site ..

But Gnome comes installed with GAIM rite? is there an uninstall system ? i think i could do this via YAST ? hope i am rite. I'll just try that out cause the only messengers i use are MSN, yahoo and gmail, but regardless if in future my system gets hanged. The force quit application combination in GNOME would be CTRL + ALT + F6 ?

The rest all that you explained mastercomputers was very much explainatory, but unless i sit down and work on it i wont understand a few bits. Can i grab hold of a book or a site where i could start learning commandline linux, i am pretty shure that i could use suse via command line ONLY. So would like to learn that too. In college we had a linux commandline but it was limited to commads like "vi" ":w" ":wq" etc .. these are editor commands .. lol i know pretty lame , but we used them to compile our C / C++ programs (uggh) ..

Newayz, thankx for all the help and support .. and waiting to gain more knowledge from you gurus

Regards
Dhanesh.

First of all, using ext2 for your filesystem is not a smart choice since it doesn't support journaling, which is very important if your system crashes. Without journaling, your computer on next boot up will take hours to do a system scan. However, with ext3 (upgradable from ext2), ReiserFS (utmost recommended) and XFS, they all come with Journaling and will only take a few seconds to scan through all the journal and then fix any filesystem errors.

GNOME is IMO, not a well chosen choice for new learners because it doesn't have the easy tools as KDE provides. I find that GNOME is even confusing for users like me (although I'm not a n00b). As for GAIM, I don't know what's going on as I don't use GAIM (I tried it, and didn't like it though).

Plus, Linus Torvalds (creator of Linux) endorses KDE over GNOME



Mozilla Firefox works with both KDE and GNOME. They are just desktops.

The force quit combination can't be CTRL+ALT+F6 beccause that combination bumps you to a text-based console.

xboxrulz

No, I would simply use Windows disk manager or Parition magic in order to simply remove the D: partition, leaving free unpartitionned space on the disk, and then boot on the suze install disk and let the install program partition the free space on the disk.