openSUSE 11 installation from hard disk
28 Jul 2008openSUSE 11 was released during vacations. So I was waiting anxiously to download and use it. The day I came to college put my luggage in the room, managed to get the LAN wire patch ( I did not know where mine was) and checked for the internet. To my amazement the connection was proper and I was getting a download speed of around 1Mbps, it may be very commoin to you but in my college where we rarely get a speed of 50 kbps. I was thrilled. I started to download the iso which was around 4.2 GB. I managed to download it in 2 hours. I had gone mad. I told about this to every one I met.
Then I knew that I did not have a DVD to burn it. So what if I had managed to download the iso I must install it. I searched for a balank DVD but nobody had it. And it was a hot afternoon, I knew that i college shops would not be open. So I opened the iso with File Roller (it is a archive utility on Linux, which lets you extract iso images also). Thanks to Debayan, he had told me about this during Mukti ’08 when he extracted the iso and then installed it using LAN on several computers simultaneosly.
So i extracted the iso in a FAT drive. I had always known that installtion could be done directly from the hard disk. But i had never done this. So I started Windows mounted the iso using Daemon Tool (a utility on windows which lets you mount images iso, mdf etc). The SUSE installer poped up. I breezed through it and restarted my laptop. Then booted up the installer. Then it came to a halt saying no repositories found or something of that sort, which happens when you dont use the DVD or CD as a medium for installtion. Then I selected the hard disk as the installtion media. Located the partition. Then it asked for the folder. I had the extracted iso in the folder “suse”. Then i typed “suse” but nothing happened giving error “No repositories found” (i remember this error parcticularly). Then I tried “/suse” and it worked. I was so excited but there was nobody near me whom I could tell this.
There was one more surprise inside. openSUSE 11 is shipped with KDE 4, this was what I wanted. If you haven’t seen KDE 4, just take a look at it. You will jsut love it. KDE 4 has an improved Kget, the download manager which gives you a speed equivalent to IDM on windows. So why use windows. The only reason I switch to windows is Counter Strike. I hope that some day it will be available.