I have laptop with Windows XP and I want to install open SUSE 13.1 on it to get rid of Windows XP; what's the procedure to do this? Thanks.

burn opensuse13.1 (prababaly 32bit if you have such processor) to usb flash with unetbootin, select to boot from usb flash in bios and follow instructions. just ask if you get stucked.

There are numerous guides to doing this online, some more detailed than others. Take a look at the site below for one:

http://opensuse-guide.org/installation.php

about the only issue will be that Opensuse NEEDS!!! a lot of resources
you really DO need 8 gig of ram ( 4 gig min.)
and you will want to have at least a i3 CPU


if you have a pentium 4 and only 1 gig of ram 13.1 will be VERY SLOW

one can probably install alternative desktop enivironment that will speed thing up.

No.

Install openSUSE 13.1 with the LXDE or the XFCE desktop, and completely avoid the bloated to death KDE desktop.

The "Desktop effects" that comes with KDE is completely useless and will eat up the resources. And if that is not enough, KDE also comes plagued by the nepomuk and akonadi b*llsh*t that will surely eat up whats left of the CPU/memory/disk resources.

Avoid installing KDE, and lock nepomuk and akonadi as uninstalled in YAST2 Software management. That's my recipe for a fast and reliable openSUSE Linux system.

KDE is dying. Rest in peace.

Long live openSUSE and LXDE! Works rather well on a lean diet as a P4 and one gig of ram.

Better yet - If you happen to have some nice hardware with say eight CPUs, 128 gig of ECC memory and a pair of GPUs then you will be able to use all of this nice performance for your own purpose, instead of satisfying a geek that implemented lots of stuff nobody really wanted to have in their Linux system.

I have Opensuse 13.1 64-bit on kde with all desktop effects turned off. Runs just fine. My Lapop has a Pentium cpu and 4gb ram and a Samsung ssd.

And, you can turn them off.

And, you can turn them off.

Now, you can argue that this is a poor choice of defaults by the KDE crew (at least, nepomuk and akonadi should default to off, until they actually do something useful, which they don't, yet, AFAIK). But to condemn a whole user interface because defaults are poorly selected? That seems a bit extreme.

Yes, you can turn them off. But they might just turn them self on when installing something, or updating something, or just by adding a new user that logs in and fires up the demons of nepomuk, akonadi, strigi et cetera. Then you can turn them off again after than. And reboot the system to stop those demon processes, and then manually clean the muk out of the system that was created just by having a new user logging in and firing up the goolie band of nepomuk and akonadi as default.

Useless functions that consume resources and provides an unnecessary security risk. And they are intertwined with the KDE desktop. Linked in, and in the install dependency chain. Like a virus.

Delete purge and forget nepomuk and akonadi. And have desktop effects to be default off. Fight the foo. Otherwise KDE is dead.

Sorry, but I disagree. I have a server with 2G RAM and 4G swap that runs an apache web server, SAMBA, iptables, Squid, squidGuard, DHCP, DNS, and nat's all of my traffic. ZERO slow-downs on it ever.

but that is NOT a desktop install on a old XP desktop computer
with Gnome or kde desktops

i KNOW for a fact that the even OLDER opensuse 11.3 will not run well on a 13 year old Pentium 4 cpu with 1 gig of ram and a gforce2 card
boot WILL take 5 + minutes

moving from the desktop to the home folder WILL take 20 to 30 seconds

firefox2 ( at that time ) will take 45 sec to open and have isues in needing to write to the SWAP partition

it will be "almost" unusable

now
that was opensuse 11
opensuse 13.1 needs even more system resources


as i type this i am using 15 % of my 8 gig of ram

1.2 gig just for the kde desktop ( most "eye candy" turned off ) and seamonkey

While I understand that the "really old hardware" poses additional limitations, 8G of RAM isn't necessary for the typical home user. 2G will suffice quite nicely.