After accidentally deleting my Fedora Core 4 partition (and the partition containing the backup image), I've decided I would like to give Suse a try instead and have a few questions.

Firstly, I would rather not have to download all 5 cd's unless I have to and after searching the forum, it seems I would need at least 3 for a basic install. Would this also include gcc and it's dependencies? as I need these to install my modem driver.

Secondly, how much disk space would a basic install need and how much would a full 5 cd install need, including gnome as well as kde?

Finally, for now, I see the 10.1 release is marked as an alpha release, how stable is this compared to, say Debian SID? Or should I just stick with 10.0 and upgrade later?

Thankyou in advance for any replies.

The first two cd's should include what you need, certainly if you include the 3rd. This includes the compilers, libraries, etc. that you should need. Default install including KDE + Gnome is about 2-2.5Gb off the top of my head at the most. The alpha release doesn't quite work the same as with Debian - packages aren't constantly updated as with Debian, and it's more releases for people to try, report back with bugs, then wait for a beta and go through the same testing process! You could run it if you wanted, but I'd stick with 10.0 for now

Thanks for the reply, very helpful. I'll stick with 10.0 and try the first 3 cd's for now. I can always download the others later if I need em.

You could just download the single DVD image and have everything on one disc.

Well a magazine in my local shop has Suse 10.0 on DVD on the cover. Unfortunately, I don't have a dvd player or writer, I've just never needed one so never bothered.

Let us know how it goes then. It's annoying when magazines put everything out on DVD which although is kinda nice they have more stuff on them, my testing machines don't have DVD drives which stuffs things!

I needed all 5 discs for a simple KDE install with no extra stuff. Very annoying since I thought a two-CD approach would be enough as it was in FC3. Three extra CD's with 30 kB/s is no fun when the installation program is already running...

I'd recommend the net install CD instead.

Yeah, not having a DVD burner/reader is a real pain. You'll really want to download and burn all 5 images. You can get away with just three but you're almost certain to run into something you want during install that's on one of the others. Save yourself the headache and just do all 5.

Many magazines do two versions of the magazine, one with cd's and one with dvd with the dvd version having a few extras.
This works fine with something like knoppix or ubuntu that go one one cd but for something like fedora or suse they are always dvd only

My next question was going to be does the installer use each disk in order or go from one to another and another and back again and what is the likelyhood of me getting halfway through the install and needing maybe one package from one of the other cd's?
Looks like that's been answered.
I have a 2 meg connection so I suppose it would actually be quicker to download all the cd's than start installing and have to go back and download the others after so I think I'll do that.

[EDIT] One other question. If I used a net install, does anyone know if Suse supports the BT Voyager USB modem this way? Usually I need to install the eciadsl driver which also needs gcc installed. To date the only distro I've tried that supports this modem out of the box is Kanotix.

[EDITED AGAIN] Does anyone have any opinions on Slick? http://www.opensuse.org/SLICK

Well I downloaded all the cd's and chose the default kde installation (really wish I'd gone with gnome) and manually added gcc and tcl/tk and as it turned out I did only need the first 3 cd's.

Everything is going well so far, just busy removing all the packages I don't want/need.
Yast is great and the package manager is much better than yum (not as good as apt/synaptic though imo).

I've tried about 12 distros in the past 6 months and so far I've only kept Fedora Core 4 and ubuntu for longer than a month but I reckon Suse will be a keeper and will make a fine Fedora replacement.