thinking of removing another linux distro

[pottzie]

I'm posting this here because this looks like as good (or bad) a place as any. If I'm wrong, let me know and I'll try elsewhere. Here's what I'm looking at.
I installed Fedora a few weeks ago, and thanks to eveyone here that helped, as it was a hassel. The conflict was with grub2, installing Fedora alongside Linux Mint and OpenSUSE.
I've had Fedora for just these few weeks, and I like it. Fedora's a little quirky, but it seems that whenever I have a beef with it, something changes and it fixes itself. I don't know how, and it's wierd when it happens, but I like that.
The problem is OpenSUSE. I haven't messed with it much, as getting Fedora to boot with grub2 took a lot. So a day or so ago, I decided it was time to see what OpenSUSE was all about. I can't get a clue as to how it sets up. The updater loops back into itself, the "yast update" isn't the most user friendly thing in the world, and I had to search Google to find out where the terminal was. Although the answer was "right in front of my eyes," as it was there on the toolbar. So I'm thinking, do I really want to go on with this?
The reason I loaed the different OS's was to see what it was like working with alternatives to Ubuntu and dpkg. Fedora seems up to the task, but OpenSUSE? Not exactly intuitive, if you ask me (and yes, no one has.)
So do I grab gparted, and risk un-doing all the work that it took to get Fedora running? My disk partitioner looks like swiss cheese, thanks to every installer giving it's sytem it's own swap partition. And maybe I'm too hard on OpenSUSE. I could wait and see if it starts to make sense to me, I wanted to learn different ways other linux systems function. But I don't feel like going through 40 miles of rough road when I have a Centos live cd that I passed up on installing and went with OpenSUSE because Centos "looked too much like Debian"
Any thoughts?

[smr54]

On the outside, in many ways, they're all quite similar. (I think the default SuSE desktop is KDE, so that will look different, but....)

If you're comfortable with partitioning, you can get rid of all the extra swap partitions, but it means editing /etc/fstab on each existing system, save one. In other words, if Fedora's swap is /dev/sda3, and Ubuntu's /dev/sda7 you could remove the sda7 and edit Ubuntu's fstab to use /dev/sda3.

As for CentOS, it's a bit different--firstly, you can't install from the live CD. Like Ubuntu and Fedora, it's Gnome by default. The difference is that it uses much older packages and a 4 year old kernel (though security patches are backported.) It's aimed more at a business/server market, where stability is usually more important than being able to play mp3s. (Though it can do that too, and I actually use mine as server/desktop).

I'd say Fedora and Ubuntu have far more in common than CentOS and Ubuntu. (Though CentOS has much more in common with Fedora.)

Not sure if any of this helps....

[pottzie]

Yes it does help, and thanks. One thing I forgot to mention is that the forums are a big plus with any distro- it's a tremendous help when you're in a jam to have someplace to go for help. Fedora not only has a great forum, but when I post a problem the response is usually within minutes. That's another thing that put me off about OpenSUSE. The forum(s) are odd, and hard to figure out. Even registering to use them is more agravating than it needs to be.
Maybe I'm just a whiner.

[stoat]

Originally Posted by pottzie

Any thoughts?

Hello again pottzie,

I'm not really sure what you're asking, but I do have some general comments. First, I think your other thread about GRUB2 worked out pretty well. And it wasn't really a hassle to get Mint's GRUB2 set up to boot Fedora. You mostly struggled with basic things like terminal commands and whether or not to include /boot in GRUB paths when there is a separate boot partition and so on. Remember? Everybody goes through that stuff. It's called learning.

Next, I don't think your partitions look so bad. Your fdisk is posted in the GRUB2 thread. The first partition doesn't end on a cylinder boundary, but that's not important any more. In fact, I've read developer talk about some future version of fdisk not reporting that anymore. And you have some partitions that are not in disk order. That can occur when partitions are deleted and new ones created. It's not a problem and very common. And you do have two swaps when one could be shared, but they're tiny compared to the total size of the drive. The swap in the LVM is probably mandatory. Otherwise, every cylinder is present and accounted for. No problem IMO.

Next, I installed OpenSUSE one time, but I don't remember a thing about it. Other people can give advice and opinions about using OpenSUSE. But if you decide to remove it, then remember that deleting its partitions could bust Mint's GRUB2 config file depending one their positions in the partition layout. It will be easy to fix, but you could also just reformat OpenSUSE's partition(s) or try another Linux in its partition(s).