installation query on opensuse 11 installation
 

hi,

newbie here.

for the past week i have been trying out opensuse 11 and ubuntu 8.04 on my compaq presario v3000 laptop. i backed up all my files and transferred them onto my home desktop whilst i trialled these two distros.

both of them worked well with my laptop and looked good, managed to get all my hardware working properly. now on ubuntu 8.04 and have decided to make a permanent move to opensuse 11 as its just more pleasant i feel.

my query is that with ubuntu, when i installed it, it gave me a option to use the entire hard drive (i have a 80gb hard drive), which i did as i do not plan on dual booting.

when i did this i have like 75ish gb left to play with using ubuntu.

but with opensuse, i am having difficulties.

when i choose the 'use entire disk' option, only 74.5 gb comes up, and even when i went to the 'edit partition' tab and deleted the partitions so that i have 80gb, it still wouldnt free up the remaining.

and also it allocates 20gb to root, this then leaves me with 50ish gb to use.

i was expecting to have the whole 80gb to play with.

Ok, so you have a hard drive that's advertised as 80GB and SUSE is only showing 74.5GB. This is normal, hard disk manufacturers report the size using the decimal version of GB which is 1GB=1000MB=1000KB=1000B. However, the OS uses the binary version of GB where 1GB=1024MB..etc. So you have a 80GB drive in decimal terms, but in binary, 74.5GB is what you really have. Since computers use binary, the binary version of GB is what should be used (I have no clue why the manufacturers use the decimal version).

aaah ok. thank you very much. its cleared it all up.

so its normal for my '80gb' hard drive to show up as 74.5gb.

:) It gets even more interesting when you find out that small files that should only take up a few bytes actually take up a lot more which is wasted on purpose! Granted the benefits of doing this outweigh the detriments.