I have used SuSE 9.1 Professional in the past, and loved it. I thought it was a great operating system, very user-friendly, and I was able to do everything I needed to without hassles.

I decided to let 9.2 pass over, and now I’m thinking of getting 9.3, although I’m not sure whether I should, and if so, how.

So, firstly, should I get SuSE 9.3 Professional?
I will want to do a dual boot with Windows XP (SP2), so will 9.3 be able to partition my hard drive? I tried to partition my hard drive with 9.1 but it won’t; so has this been sorted in 9.3?
I’ve a 250 GB SATA hard drive and it already has three partitions for Windows (C, D and E) and I don’t want to remove any; they are all needed. What I want to do is resize C and D, create a SWAP partition, and then have two other partitions for Linux (one for SuSE and one for Ubuntu).


And, if I do go for SuSE 9.3, should I purchase the boxed set from Novell for about €100, or should I purchase the GPL SuSE CDs offered by LinuxCD?
What are the real differences between the boxed set and the GPL CDs, apart from no books or manuals obviously?
I’ve been told some propriety software isn’t included in the GPL CDs … is there any propriety software, or none at all, or what?

What would you recommend?


Thanks all.

Not sure about SuSE, but in the past the differences between the purchased version and the free version were drivers (ATI and NVIDIA not included), and usually a few software packages as well. Not sure about specifics here though...

As far as partitioning, SuSE has the easiest tool around from what I've used. I'm sure it will have no problem doing what you want. I resized using partition magic in XP first this time around though, and I ended up regretting it, resizing my SATA drive took around 30 minutes, vs maybe 5 in Linux. Setting it up for dual boot was cakewalk however.

Thanks for your response.

In regards to partitioning, I’ve used SuSE’s partitioning tool on Windows 98SE and I did find it extremely easy, although on my new computer which came with Windows XP it just won’t work. It says it cannot partition the drive.

So has this been fixed in SuSE 9.3?

Thanks.