bootable iso
 

i downloaded suse from ftp site, and there's a 23mb boot iso that i have to burn; and i want to burn them into 5 cds. however, is there a way to have the 23mb bootable iso with the contents of cd1? instead of having an entire cd for just booting containing one 23mb file. thank you.

I'm not familiar with SuSE, but I would have thought that CD1 would also have been bootable and the bootable ISO is for a different purpose (perhaps for getting a minimal system up which can be used to install remotely?). I don't know, but that's what I would guess.

Perhaps someone with SuSE experience can confirm (or otherwise...)

Yes, that's it. The boot.iso is supposed to boot the machine with modules needed to access the network and do the ftp install. But notice that you won't have isos of the other cd's, as this type of installation does not relies on cd's, but on the packages.
The system will boot, do some testings and then let you choose the closest mirror. From this point, you'll download countless amounts of packages. Must have a good link for this to run smoothly.
But you can download the entire tree and build a volume for installing in aonther computer on your network, if its the case. Total is ~3GB of data.