Jamie's Random Musings
Various thoughts and adventures, including but not limited to Linux, Windows XP and Widows Vista, and assorted bits of hardware new and old.
Monday 5 January 2009, 3:16 PM
openSUSE Installation, DVD vs. LiveCD
- The DVD contains both Gnome and KDE desktops, so you can choose between them during installation.
- After installation, the main software repository will be set to be the DVD, so if you later want to install additional packages, it will look there first - or at least try to. If you still want to pick up any new packages from the main online openSUSE OSS repo, you have to add the appropriate line to the Software Repositories list.
- You can not simply boot and run openSUSE from the DVD in the way that you can from the LiveCD, so if your intent is to just try openSUSE and see if you like it, without actually installing it, you must use one of the LiveCD distributions.
Beyond these few differences, the installation is the same.
By the way, openSUSE installed and runs extremely well on the laptop with AMD CPU, ATI graphic card, Broadcom wired network adapter and Atheros wireless network adapter. Everything else that I typically install (Sun Java, Adobe Flash, Mozilla Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Citrix ICA Web Client, Opera, Gizmo5, mySQL, QT4 and more) was either already installed in the base system, or installed without a hitch.
jw 5/1/2009
PreviousComments on this post
Nice post explaining the differences between the two. I recently tried openSUSE 11.1 from the DVD and was impressed with its overall stability. Showed it to a Windows friend simply as 'Linux' and let them navigate around. He, too, was impressed with how much was there, compared to having to individually reload every single piece of software on his system after a new 1.5Tb HD purchase like yourself.
More good news, openSUSE announced this week they would use 8-9 month update cycles, giving them the flexibility to include the latest KDE or kernel updates rather than get caught lagging like Ubuntu et al. recently did. Fedora also did the right thing by delaying the release of 10 for a month while they waited for OpenOffice 3. As a user, I was grateful.
Thanks for reading and commenting. I agree with your opinion about the scheduling. If I have one significant disappointment with Ubuntu, it is that they didn't include OpenOffice 3.0 (and still haven't updated to it yet). Their excuse about waiting for the first OOo update to get better stability rings a bit hollow, especially when Mandriva released 2009.0 before Ubuntu 8.10, but they still managed to include it.
jw
