I have years of Sun Solaris Unix experience, and will in the next few weeks install Suse Linux 9.1 Pro and totally abandon Windows, except for games. I have a few questions before I begin. Any help is most appreciated: 1. Can I choose to install the Gnome desktop only, or do I also have to choose KDE with Suse? 2. Does the Gnome or KDE desktop include a notepad program, a calculator, etc. by default? 3. Will I be able to uninstall certain integrated components of the desktop environment, such as the Gnome Calculator, and use other similar applications instead? 4. Is the Suse equivalent to the Control Panel installed by the OS, or is this a function of the desktop environment? 5. Can I choose to install Ximian Red Carpet instead of YAST, or would YAST be automatically installed? In this case, could I install Red Carpet and uninstall YAST? 6. If I install a theme for a desktop environment, will this theme apply to all applications, such as the Control Panel (sorry for the Windows speak), web browser, Red Carpet, open office, etc? 7. This is not really a question, because there is no correct answer. I have 50-60 gigabytes to share between Windows XP and Suse 9.1 only for the two OSes and their programs. All data will be on another hard drive. Can I link my Linux /home directory to this other data drive without creating a separate /home partition? In this case, I assume /home would automatically be installed on the / partition. The data drive will be FAT32 for both Windows and Linux to share. For a 60 gigabyte drive split between the two operating systems, can anyone give me a good partitioning scheme with the suggested sizes for each partition? Separate partitions will be made for /, /boot, and /usr. /opt will be combined with /usr. This is for home use only, will I need a separate partition for /var and /tmp? Can I move /tmp to /var or vice versa?

1) Yes you can but if you have to space (which it looks as though you do) I would suggest installing KDE too as you then have a wider choice of applications to run. 2) Yep. FYI most KDE apps begin with a "k" (eg kcalc) and gnome ones with either a "g" or "gnome-" (eg gnome-calculator). You might find that you prefer kcalc to the default gnome one (you can run either, doesn't matter which window manager you choose) hence the reason I suggested installing both KDE and gnome. 3) You can uninstall them although you'll find that you will run into a lot of dependency problems when working with distros that use RPMs. Trying to remove some packages may result in others being removed too (which you wanted to keep!). You can however easily set what apps are used by default. 4) You'll find that as the window manager's own config tool (used for file associations, themes, keyboard shortcuts etc) you will have a collection of tools dependent on the distro for the more basic configuation like network settings and software installation. SuSE uses yast for this (I think it is now yast2) and it is installed by default. 5) You can install Red Carpet if you like, it only provides a fraction of the funtionality of yast so keep both. It is more of a tool just for keeping software up to date. 6) Yes, although you may find some differences running KDE apps under gnome and vice versa. 7) I would stick to a home directory with a linux filesystem and have a separate partition for you data. A suggestion: 1st partition = 20Gb for XP (NTFS/FAT32) 2nd partition = 20Gb for / (ext3/reiser) 3rd partition = 512Mb for linux swap 4th partition = rest for data (FAT32) With the above setup you can make all the partitions primary. No real need to create separate ones for /opt etc, you can always add more mount points at a later date. If you can do without the extra data partition then make the first two partitions ~30Gb.