After a thorough system analysis, YaST presents reasonable suggestions for all installation settings. The options that sometimes need manual intervention in common installation situations are presented in the tab. Find more special options in the tab. To modify the suggestions, click and select the category you want to change. After configuring any of the items presented in these dialogs, you are always returned to the summary window, which is updated accordingly. You can reset changes you already made by clicking +. YaST then shows the original proposal again. The individual settings are discussed in the following sections.
The tab consists of following options:
In most cases, YaST proposes a reasonable partitioning scheme that can be accepted without change. YaST can also be used to customize the partitioning but you should be an experienced user to change partitioning. For more information about custom partitioning, refer to Section “Using the YaST Partitioner” (Chapter 2, Advanced Disk Setup, ↑Reference).
When you select the partitioning item in the suggestion window for the first time, the YaST partitioning dialog displays the proposed partition settings. To accept these settings, click or change them before continuing.
YaST normally proposes a reasonable partitioning scheme with sufficient disk space. If you want to implement your own partitioning scheme, consider the following recommendations concerning the requirements for different system types.
Table 1.2. Space Requirements
|
Installation Type |
Minimal Required Space |
|---|---|
|
GNOME Desktop |
2.2 GB |
|
KDE Desktop |
2.0 GB |
|
Minimal Graphical System |
1 GB |
|
Text Mode |
700 MB |
The requirements in the Table 1.2, “Space Requirements” cover only the free disk space needed for the system. Your personal data like your documents, music files, and images require additional space.
If a hard disk containing a Windows FAT or NTFS partition is selected as the installation target, YaST offers to delete or shrink this partition. This functionality is especially useful if the selected hard disk contains only one Windows partition that covers the entire hard disk. If YaST sees that there is not enough space on the selected hard disk, but that space could be made available by deleting or shrinking a Windows partition, it presents a dialog in which to choose one of these two options.
If you select , the Windows partition is marked for deletion and the space is used for the installation of openSUSE.
![]() | Deleting Windows |
|---|---|
If you delete Windows, all data will be lost beyond recovery as soon as the formatting starts. | |
To shrink the Windows partition, interrupt the installation and boot Windows to prepare the partition from there. For all Windows file systems do:
Run scandisk
Run defrag
Temporarily deactivate the swap file (Windows optimizations)
After these preparations, return to the Linux partitioning setup and select . After a quick check of the partition, YaST opens a dialog with a suggestion for resizing the Windows partition.
The first bar graph shows how much disk space is currently occupied by Windows and how much space is still available. The second bar graph shows how the space would be distributed after the resizing, according to YaST's current proposal. See Figure 1.10, “Resizing the Windows Partition”. Accept the proposed settings or use the slider to change the partition sizing (within certain limits).
If you leave this dialog by selecting , the settings are stored and you are returned to the previous dialog. The actual resizing takes place later, before the hard disk is formatted.
openSUSE contains a number of software packages for various application purposes. Click in the suggestion window to start the software selection and modify the installation scope according to your needs. Select your categories from the list in the middle and see the description in the right window. Each category contains a number of software packages that meet most requirements for that category. For more detailed selection of software packages to install, select to switch to the YaST Package Manager. See Figure 1.11, “Installing and Removing Software with the YaST Package Manager”.
Of course, you can also install additional software packages or remove software packages from your system at any time later. For more information, refer to Chapter 3, Installing or Removing Software.
Here you can change the locale settings. If you want to change the system language or to configure support for secondary languages, select . To change the keyboard layout, select .
Select the language from the list. The primary language is used as the system language. If you want to have support for other languages, but do not want to change the system language, select these languages as secondary languages. For more information, see Chapter 6, Changing the System Language with YaST.
Select the keyboard layout from the list. By default, the layout corresponds to the selected primary language. After selecting a different layout, use the field at the bottom of the dialog to check if you can enter special characters of that layout correctly. Find more information about changing the keyboard layout in Section 2.3, “Setting Up Keyboard and Mouse”. When finished, click to return to the installation settings dialog.
The tab in the dialog provides only basic options. If you are an advanced user and want to configure booting, change time zone, or default runlevel, select the tab. It shows the following additional entries not contained on the tab:
This dialog presents all the hardware information YaST could obtain about your computer. Select any item in the list and click to see detailed information about the selected item. You may also add PCI IDs to device drivers with this dialog.
During the installation, YaST proposes a boot configuration for your system. Normally, you can leave these settings unchanged. However, if you need a custom setup, modify the proposal for your system. For information, read Section “Configuring the Boot Loader with YaST” (Chapter 14, The Boot Loader, ↑Reference). The boot method should only be changed by experienced computer users.
In this dialog, change your region and time zone by selecting them from the lists. Choose between and (GMT) under . The selection depends on how the BIOS hardware clock is set on your machine. If it is set to GMT, which corresponds to UTC, your system can rely on openSUSE to switch from standard time to daylight saving time and back automatically. Click to set the current date and time. When finished, click to return to the installation settings dialog.
openSUSE can boot to different runlevels. Normally there should be no need to change anything here, but if necessary set the default runlevel with this dialog. Refer to Section “Configuring System Services (Runlevel) with YaST” (Chapter 13, Booting and Configuring a Linux System, ↑Reference) for information about runlevel configuration.