Product: SuSE 6.4 ( Evaluation Copy )

Test Machine Specs: HP Brio PIII 500MHz 64MB SDRAM Matrox MGA G200 8MB

Total Installation Time: 43 mins.

Number of reboots: 1

New Features: USB support, Crystal Fusion Sound Card Support, ReiserFS.

"A piece of cake" that's how easy installation of an Operating System should

be. Try reading this installation guide, after that, installing SuSE might

be like eating chocolate cake.

Booting via CD

Insert the SuSE CD in your CD-Drive and start the computer. The entire OS

installation is divided into 8 parts, each part characterized by its own

setup. Be sure that you have the boot sequence reading Boot via CD selected in

the system BIOS. The first initializing screen tells you about the SuSE web

site and their phone numbers. You can jot down these and call them if you need

any further information about their products. Shortly a Graphical Interface,

similar to that of Windows appears. The page is divided into two columns. The

left column gives a summary of the step that you are currently at and the

right one, a brief description of what you need to do.

Selecting a language: The default language selected is English(US). The next

screen requests you to select the Keyboard Layout and the Time Zone. You are

then required to select either a complete New Installation or update an

existing SuSE installation. In this case a "New Installation" was selected.

Partitioning the Hard Disk: This is one of the key steps for installing Linux.

If this is the first time that you are installing Linux, then you need to

repartition your hard disk using fdisk or Partition Magic. Make sure that you

have 2 partitions dedicated only to Linux. This is because, unlike Windows

which makes use of a swap file, Linux requires an entire partition dedicated

to it. The size of the Swap Partition should ideally be double the amount

of RAM on your system. If you are going to use the machine with SuSE as

your sole OS then click on the first option, else choose any of the remaining

options. You can use the entire Hard Disk for installing SuSE or like the

common option, choose Custom Partitioning.

Creating/Modifying the Partition Table:

Thanks to the GUI partitioning tool, things are a lot easier than the

not so friendly fdisk. Two options were asked while creating the partition for

SuSE 6.4 .