openSUSE 11.3 is released and many new users will be looking for some simple guide to have a dual boot. I am going to guide you in this article step by step with images showing the executed step that how to install openSUSE with windows 7. Installation medium used will be openSUSE 11.3 64bit KDE live CD. System configuration is:

• Intel Centrino Dual core 2 Processor
• 4GB RAM
• Intel GM45 graphic Card
• DVD Drive for CD to boot

I assume that you have already windows 7 installed on your system. Now the 1st thing you need to do is have some spare disk space to install Linux on it. If don’t have yet, use Gparted(live cd) or partition manager(windows software) to spare some space for new installation. Read the documentation of the mentioned software for how to have shrink or spare disk space from any drive. Now lets jump to the installation of openSUSE. Before doing all this, make sure you BACKUP your data.

1- If you don’t have it yet, download the iso from openSUSE download site and write it to CD, before writing always check the md5sum to check for the corrupt file. After burning, boot from the CD you just burned., and go to LIVE desktop. You will see the desktop showed in figure below.

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2- Now is the time to start installation. Click on the install icon on the desktop.

3- Select your language and keyboard setup.

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4- Select your location and set the date & time.

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5- Now is the time to setup the partitions on the disk. By default setup will create its own partition table for you as shown in the below image. But it may not be the setup of the disk we want, so to create our own partitions click on the button ‘create partition setup‘.

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5a- Choose ‘Custom partitioning‘ from the three choices given as shown in the image.

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5b- By completing step 5a, you will see the screen below. Now choose the drive you want to setup, if you have one drive, it will be sda, the 2nd will be showed as sdb. In this case, we will choose sda.

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5c- By choosing sda you will see your disk partitions including windows NTFS one. You will also see the blank space which you created by using Gparted or other software. sda1,sda2,sda3 are windows partitions which i don’t want to touch except mounting them. In the image below you will see sda4 as Extended Partition, where it have logical partitions as sda5,sda6,sda7 will be used as root file system, swap and a backup partition(in my case for data to save). Here all these partitions are created before, but when you reach this setup, you can setup your disk partitions by using the spare drive you created. Make that whole spare drive as Extended and then make logical drives in it depending on your needs. You can create many as you want. I make three, one for root, one for swap and one for my documents. To mount it, choose the partition and click on Edit button below.

5d- If you are done successfully with above steps, now lets mount all partitions.

5d1- In this image you can see that i mounted the windows C partition where windows is installed. It is sda2, sda1 always is reserved partition in windows 7. You can mount all other drives like D, E if you have the same way like sda2.

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5d2- Now lets mount the root file system. You can choose any format option from the drop down, i choose ext4 and input / in mount partition (mount point) option below. It will mount sda5 as root to install your new Linux OS.

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5d3- Do the same with the swap partition. Just choose swap from the format option and click ok. If you have other partitions, like sda7, sda8 you can mount it to any name you want in mount point area.

5e- This image shows the changes i done to the partitions. Be careful about formatting partitions. You can see F, that mean this partition will be formatted. Don’t format partition which have your documents. Formatting option is discussed in step 5d2 and 5d3.

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6- This image shows the final changes we have done to the disk. Check it again and again and make sure is correct, if not you can edit it again. When you are sure click the next button to proceed.

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7- Next is to create user, enter the desired details and make sure that all the check boxes are unchecked for security reasons. Click next.

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8- Enter your root password here. Different from the normal user above.

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9- After step 8, its time to check your setup for installation. Check the setup which is going to take place, if you are satisfy with it, click Install. It will ask to confirm the installation.

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Now wait for the installation to finish.

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10- Installation is finished partially. Choose to reboot to finish the installation. After 1st reboot, installation will setup the configuration for the hardware and system, this time it will not show any GRUB MENU for multiple boot. But the next time you reboot, it will show you the nice graphical screen with multiple boot options for Linux and windows.

Note: If something went wrong at the grub menu for multiple OS, so follow this tutorial to repair/install the grub again.

Update: If you are on 11.2 and want to upgrade to 11.3 through zypper and don’t want to install from scratch. This post will help you.

Good luck, enjoy openSUSE/Linux and have a lot of fun!

Arif

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