Hi,

I'm planning to install SUSE 9.1 to replace my Mandrake 10 install tonight and I need reassurance with something.

Am I right in presuming that I can literally just pop the Suse CD in and delete my current Mandrake partition and recreate for Suse? I've not got anything I want to keep in my current Mandrake install so I'm happy to wipe the whole thing.

We use Suse here at work and it'll be in my best interest to stay in line.

cheers all.

yeah sure! SuSE should be bootable, the setup can wipe out everything if you want, tho it will do a partitioning suggestion itself (wich was never as I liked it, but ok...) it works

greetz,
.-=~ iluvatar ~=-.

Great stuff.

I've also arrived at the conclusion that Mandrake is a bit bloated.

thanks for the reply.

Yes - you can definitely just drop the CD for a new distro into the drive and then kick off the installation process. However, if doing this is something you've decided to definitely do, I would suggest that you also use the opportunity to (possibly) repartition your disk. If you'd be happy with retaining the existing partitioning scheme under the new distro, then nevermind, but if you've been thinking "I wish I had partitioned things a little differently", well, now's the time.

I'm sure you already know that but it bears repeating anyway. Good luck with the project -- J.W.

Hello,
I have Ubuntu occupying the whole harddrive now and I want to replace it for a dual-boot setup with Bodhilinux and SUSE.
My question is, how would I ideally partition the hdd now for this, so both OSs can access my user data. Does it make sense to make a separate partition just for /home directory?
Thanks, Ben

(I feel this question is very closely related to the thread title, but let me know if I should rather start a new tread)

It is better to start a new thread: what if the OP decided to mark the thread as solved just as you were posting?

You should always have a /home partition, or else you're going to wipe your personal files if you re-install. It's not a good idea to have two distros sharing the same /home though. At the best, you'll have things in your menu for one distro that are unavailable because they're in the other. At the worst, you may have two different versions of the same program that have different ideas on their configuration files, so that neither works properly.

The best idea is to decide which distro you want to use most and give that a separate partition for /home. The other can still access your personal files on the separate partition, but will keep its configuration files in its own /home directory in its root partition. You can alter /etc/fstab to ensure that the separate partition is mounted automatically. So, if SUSE was on sda1, /home on sda2, and Bodhi on sda3, you'd create a mountpoint /media/home in Bodhi and alter its fstab to include
/dev/sda2 /media/home auto defaults 0 0

thanks!
Is there a way to format the separate /home partition so that Windows can see/access the files on it as well?
Or In other words, if I do like you said:
1 partition for each OS (makes 2) plus an extra one as /home of only the primary distro (makes a total of 3, plus swap = 4), can I format the /home partition as NTFS? That way, the main Linux should still be able to handle it, but Windows can see it too, right?

I have no personal experience here (I've never had a computer with Windows) but I'd avoid making /home NTFS. Linux may cope, but I wouldn't push my luck. I had a few cases of USB memory used for backups corrupting, but it's never happened (touch wood!) since I reformated them to ext2. It seems there are tools for reading Linux partitions from Windows:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Acces...ws-48292.shtml