Minimal openSUSE 11.1 install

Installation
openSUSE 11.1 is Out - Get it Now!free download

Boot to the DVD and choose to install from the menu. You can press F2 and select an alternate language if required. The system will boot straight into the installer, where you should begin your 'New Installation'. I chose to use the automatic configuration option and proceeded to set my time zone. At the 'Desktop Selection' screen hit the 'Other' button and choose either 'Minimal X Window', or 'Minimal

Server Selection (Text Mode)'. The first option will install the base system, plus the X Window server and the basic desktop environment, Tab Window Manager (TWM). If you want less control then take this one, but if you want more, then take the second text-mode option.

openSUSE 11.1 installer - choosing a desktop

Partition your hard drives however you desire - I like to turn off access time and so select 'No access time' on a per-partition basis. Create a user (I turn off automatic login), complete the rest of the setup procedure and begin the install. If you took the second option, then at the summary screen ensure you change the default run level from 3 to 5 (full multi-user with network and display manager). This entire install process took only 6 minutes to complete and a further 2 minutes to configure the system on first boot. If you took the first option, then by default it will boot straight to the X Window desktop manager and the basic TWM desktop. You can log into this environment as root or switch to a terminal if you prefer. Unlike Ubuntu, the base openSUSE system includes a fully functional splash screen and includes many services, such as D-Bus, HAL, Firewall, CPUFreq, NFS, CUPS, OpenSSH and Postfix out of the box. It also includes YaST and all the modules for configuring your system. Next we can begin to tweak the system.

Base system

Now that you have a basic X Window system installed (if you don't yet, you will shortly), we can use the Internet to download the latest packages. Any packages that have been updated since the initial release will be installed from the Internet, while anything else will be installed from the local DVD. By default the openSUSE installer will have configured your repositories for you; however, you can use a custom mirror if you like. To accomplish this, I use Zypper, openSUSE's powerful RPM package management tool.

Reboot your computer and you should be greeted with the openSUSE GNOME Desktop Manager. Log in as the user you set up during installation and it should load the GNOME desktop.

Now that you have a fully functioning GNOME environment, you can continue to install any other applications you require and tweak your system further. The pattern we used has pulled in many of the basic packages we need, including a web browser, email and calendar program, chat client, CD burner and an image viewer. If you didn't use the pattern, then you'll need to install the packages you want manually. There are many other ways to tweak your system further of course, now that it is installed. Try disabling unused services, removing programs you don't need and introducing some package locks.

This new custom openSUSE system boots from GRUB to login screen in around 28 seconds, taking a further 6 seconds to load the GNOME desktop. It is using up 175 MB of memory once fully logged in and just over 1.7 GB of hard drive space. Compare this to the default install, which takes 39 seconds to boot and over 10 seconds to load the desktop, while using up 3.6 GB of hard drive space and over 315 MB of me

Conclusion

If you want a really light weight environment then openSUSE might not be the way to go, but if it's your favourite operating system, you don't have to give it up just yet! You can tweak the system to make it quite small, especially with the help of Zypper and its ability to lock packages. At the very least, you will learn some more about how your openSUSE system works and, if at the end you decide to just install everything, well, you can do that too!


openSUSE 11.1 - custom GNOME desktop