Suse 10.1
 

Hello everyone,
I'm planning on installing Suse 10.1 on a 2.8 GHz P4, I bought 5 Cd's no manual. I'm planning on a dual boot Win XP pro and Suse, at this time I have 512Mbs of memory which I'd like to upgrade to 2 GB. At present I'm using a P2 for the internet and want to put the P4 on the internet to avoid viruses ect after having this type of problem with the P4. I've been doing a bit of reading to see what types of problems other people are having.
I've learned I should use Fat 32, I should have an administrator and log on as another person. I'm concerned about using a Raid configuration for the hard drives, this is all new to me and any advice would be appreciated.
Carl2

welcome :)
You mean you want to install your windows on a fat32?
If it's not installed yet, fat32 would be the way to go because it's read-and-write mountable from linux.
If you get stuck on something, drop a line!

I'm not sure I understand. If you want to dual boot Win XP and Linux, then you need to partition your drive appropriately. For Win XP, the file system will be NTFS. For Linux, it'll be something like ext3 or reiserfs. If you want to set up a common or shareable partition that can be read by both Windows and Linux, then you will want to format it as FAT32 (because that is the only format that can be read and written by both OS's)

Bottom line is that you want to let each OS use an appropriate file system. Setting aside a small, "common" FAT32 partition is useful in dual booting, but you want each OS to be using the file system that's most approrpriate rather than a one-size-fits-all approach across the board

All,
Thanks for the replies. Yes, fat 32 so both OS can read and write, I've got plenty of space so I'll probably make at least 3 partitions on the Hard drives. One for each OS and one for downloads and other stuff that needs to be in a safe place.
JW
I am familiar with FAT 32 and NFTS, frist time I've heard of ext3 or reiserfs which I feel you'd reccomend. I'm involved with AI and want to download and be able to retrive from a netural area to windows or linux.
No one seems to be worried about Raid so I'm hoping that won't be a problem.
Again thanks for the advice.
Carl2

ext3 and reiserfs are both journalled file systems that are used by Linux. There's plenty of information online about them, and either one is well suited for a Linux system. (SuSE uses reiserfs as the default choice) Not to repeat myself but for best results on a dual boot WinXP/Linux system, you should define NTFS partitions for XP, ext3 or resierfs partitions for Linux, and then a FAT32 partition to store data that you want to make available to both operating systems. Note that FAT32 cannot support Linux file permissions, therefore it should only be used to store a user's data files, not any of the actual system files.

Good luck with it and Welcome to LQ!

I dual boot XP and Suse 10.0 and I use this program to read ReiserFS from XP

http://www.wolfsheep.com/map/rfsgui/

it requires MSVCR71.DLL (not included with XP)

The next one looks better but it requires dotnet and I don't install that

http://yareg.akucom.de/

SuSe will not loose your XP partition without showing multiple warnings (it did for me) so I feel it is perfectly safe to install it with XP! Grub will be your boot loader by default... (Might be able to go with the older lilo system but I did not look into that)

XP should be on your first primary partition of the drive you wish to install suse on for best results! It will warn you if a misplaced XP partition is about to interfere with the ReiserFS system... (I have had plenty of misplaced XP partitions) Otherwise, your XP NTFS/FAT32 partition will be resized and a ReiserFS system will be added and formated without incident!

Like was said above, a FAT32 partition will be optimal between the 2 operating systems for read/write operations. You can also install XP on a FAT32 system if your drive is small enough or you make a small partition for it during XP setup... If the drive is to large, XP will simply remove the FAT32 option from setup.

Installing XP on Fat32 has some security and preformance implications though so you have to think it out and find the best solution!

SuSe has great RAID support... It worked with my 3ware sata raid 5 volume no problem! I don't know if you have a special raid card of if you want to create a software based raid strip set? The later may have preformance issues, I've never tried software based raid.

Between ext3 & reiserfs, I believe they say reiserfs is newer and has higher preformance which is important when working with many small files.. Let me look up a link for that:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiserfs

There is the wikipedia wiki on it and here is the page where I found those windows programs to read reiserfs incase you decide to skip the fat32 solution and do a lot of rebooting instead:

http://p-nand-q.com/download/rfstool.html

Just a couple of thoughts:
Since you have plenty of space, why not make an extra partition for /home. This way
if something goes wrong and you need to reinstall, you won't lose anything
on your /home partition which can save a lot of hassle, frustration and reconfiguration.

Also, I'm running SuSE 10 and I found that installing the root partition as reiserfs
negatively affected performance. No idea why. It didn't seem like it was isolated to my
machine because when Linux Magazine did a an article on filesystem performance in their April 2006
issue they encountered the same problem, although it worked fine for Ubuntu. Installing / as ext3
and others as reiserfs seemed to give a performance boost. I don't know, though, if it has been
fixed in SuSE 10.1.

I dual boot XP and SuSE 10.1. I give XP 7 GB as NTFS on a logical drive within an extended partition. XP is actually more of a spyware trojan than an operating system. Installing it on an extended partition takes a lot of the bite of its spying abilities. Also, if you partition and format with the partition magic emergency floppies this doesn't let XP put in a ton of multiple data streams to hide information from the user. I never let XP do the format. Plus, XP takes an hour and PM takes five seconds. Make your "/" partition for linux the first primary partition, about 9 GB for SuSE 10.x. Make the second primary partition /home. Give it at least 70 GB. If you absolutely have to use FAT32, the worst of all current filesystems, so be it. Install XP first. Then, install SuSE.

Incidently, all the opensuse mirrors contain /opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/boot/boot.iso.

This is a full bootable network install disk that blows away that mini iso from opensuse.org

All,
No drives detected when installing linux Suse 10.1. I've got two 80GB Maxtor drives connected as master and slave to the Ide raid connection.
I load the drivers for this when installing windows or windows can't find the drives, windows partitions and formats the partition, NFTS or fat (Partition size must be less than about 30GB to format in Fat). After creating enough partitions to limit the size in Fat I installed two versions of windows. I just tried to install Suse 10.1 and Suse dosen't mention storage devices and can't find the Hard drives.
PS, by this time it's an old machine.
Carl2

A few thoughts of my own:

XP will actually benefit from being on a fat32 partition on older machines. If your CPU is about 700MHz or greater and you have at least 256MB of RAM stick with NTFS, though.

Putting XP on a logical drive in an extended partition is an interesting idea, but I don't recommend it. XP is finicky and odd stuff can happen. Save yourself some headaches. Put it on the first primary partition on your first disk (hda1 or sda1).

Hardware RAID support is getting better in Linux, but still can be touch and go at times, especially if you have a Promise controller. Promise Fastrack controllers are a hopeless endeavor.

Set up and format your XP partition ahead of time with a third-party partitioner like PartitionMagic or QTParted (on the Knoppix CD). QTParted is freaky and buggy, but still better than trying to use the XP installer if you can't get your hands on a copy of PartitionMagic.

Install XP FIRST! When you install Suse it will add XP as an option when it sets up grub (the default) or lilo. If you install XP after Suse it will put its own bootloader in the MBR without asking any questions and without any regard to what is already there. Thus, grub (or lilo) will get hosed and you won't be able to boot into Suse.

Creating a tiny (~30MB max) /boot partition with ext2 will speed up your bootloader quite a bit.

It is really new so a lot of people don't know about it, but the kernel does allow for writing to NTFS (if it is compiled in, I think the stock Suse kernel does include it). Be aware that it is not very stable yet, so your best bet is to stay with leaving NTFS partitions in read-only mode.

Having a fat32 partition for shared data between the 2 OS's is an excellent idea. Be sure it is big enough to hold everything that you want both XP and Suse to work with. As mentioned earlier, fat32 does not support linux's permission structure so you should only use it for data storage. Program and system files need to be on a file system that is native to linux.

A journaling file system for Suse should be used without exception. Reiser4 is blistering fast, but not quite stable yet. I get excellent results from ext3 and Reiser3, with ReiserFS being notably faster, although I haven't done any benchmarks. This is just seat-of-the-pants experience.

Suse's installer may not be reporting any disks because your RAID controller isn't supported. Try ditching the RAID array and just use the disks by themselves. I can use my Promise Fastrack under linux as long as I don't use it for RAID and just connect the disks to the controllers (I have to set up each disk as an array with only 1 disk in it). Hitting F3 on the CD/DVD startup menu will give you the option to specify any kernel modules needed for the install (like usb storage and the like). Maybe someone can shed some light on this and tell you what you can give it that will make it see your RAID array.

viel gluck!

J

litlmary,
I did some searches, and thought I'd found a solution. I just downloaded a linux driver from Promise that someone had said worked for them, but I did learn about pressing f3 on startup. My system dosen't reconize the driver (3_FTTX4000_S150TX_SUSE91_x86_32_1.0.0.24.tar ) so there still is no hard drive. I just disconnected the Raid drives and put in a smaller hard drive and am installing linux on it. I think I just installed CD 1 twice, this time I changed to CD 2.
Druing my searches I saw quite a few people with Raid problems. I got a reply from Promise, My note with a phone number, not bad for a Sunday.
CD 2 seems to be installing but the install will take forever. XP with raid installs in less than 20 minutes. I should be able to see if the Suse system works and can be used on the internet and in the meantime I'll continue looking for a raid driver that will work.
I'll probably reformat the larger HDs and use NFTS for windows (six drives is to many), the Suse program formats before install also.
The Hard drives sold nowadays must be for recording TV shows, I've got 40 GB on this drive and it's plenty large.
Carl

The promise driver you downloaded, if it will work with your controller, is archived (hence the .tar extension). You need to decompress it to use it. There should probably be some type of readme or instructions in the archive once you have it untarred.

litlmary
The system installed yesterday, and is up and operating. I noticed it contains manuals that I should read. For some reason install stopped after disk 3, Possibly I just have the basics. After XP I'm not terribly impressed with it, no explorer or disk defrag. It's for use on the internet and most of the programs I use are windows programs.
Thanks for the tip on the tar, like a zip file, I'm guessing that Suse can untar it.
Carl

Suse can't mount the drive, under properties it is Floppy, folder, nothing, 4.1 GB volume, 1.4 GB free space. It was formatted in the HP using fat 32, I didn't see any format in Suse.
Carl

I first used Suse in 2000, it was alright and played good mp3s