SuSE 7.3 Download Question

Hi,

I'd like to get my hands on SuSE 7.3 without needing to spend money for the minimal benefit it would give me over a different distro. (Btw, I bought SuSE 7.1, so it's not like I'm some stingy bastard, hehe )

My ISP is not very stable - basically my connection gets interrupted for like a minute every hour.

Could I download SuSE 7.3 with my connection with the downloader which is part of the SuSE 7.3 installer? Will the entire download fail if I time-out once, or will it automatically resume without corrupting any files?

The problem I have with this download: when I need to format my harddisk, I'd need to download it all again. I don't want that. Could I download all the SuSE files with Windows onto my file-storage-patition (the one I keep stuff like warez, mp3s, config files, my school work etc. on ) and install it then from there, once the download is complete? Would that work?

If that would work, could someone suggest a good FTP download manager with which I can easily download the entire SuSE 7.3 Linux directory without needing to reconnect when I time-out, and one which doesn't corrupt files a lot?

Thanks!

1. paragraph:
nice way you think of it, but suse anyway makes the money of their professional services and not their distro. a suse technician can be up to $1000 per day.

2. change ISP

3. depends on what exactly happens when your ISP disconnects you

4. of course you can. get a ftp client or download manager and connect to ftp.suse.com

5. getright, gozilla, any should do this task. you are not asking for much

Adding to M. H.'s reply:

be sure to download to/store the files on a FAT 32 partition. Anything else is trouble (FAT 16, NTFS) - you'll have to be able to access the files from YaST for install, and that can't read anything Linux can't read.

Don't even attempt to d/l from ftp.suse.com - that server is slow, period. Check out the mirror list at http://www.suse.com/us/support/down...nt_mirrors.html and choose something else. My favourite is ftp.gwdg.de , for you somewhere else might be better.

I was going to store SuSE on an FAT32 partition, so that's no problem...

Since you mentioned that, I've got another question: is there no way to mount other Windows file systems, such as NTSF, on Linux? I'm just wondering because I like having access from my Linuxbox to the WinXP partition on that machine (C:\ is NTSF and D:\ is FAT32, thus, with my current knowledge, I can only mount D:\)

I would change my ISP, M. Hirsch, but I'm off to university in about half a year (phat bandwidth! w00t! ), so it's not really worth changing now, as I am the only person in my household who uses the Internet. Also, the current alternatives to my current ISP are not much better.

Back to my original question - is it easy to install SuSE from a local FAT32 directory? If not, could I get some advice please, or a direction to some helpful resource (suse.de isn't very helpful in this matter, they just explain how to install it directly from an FTP, which I don't want to do)?

yes.linux supports reading ntfs. but you should not write to a ntfs partition...

to your university thing: do you have telnet access? download everything to your /tmp there and get it directly from them. should be quite fast. think about installing a re-route daemon and getting your stuff once per (day, week) with a zip-drive

i just wanted to recommend switching isp. but i cannot tell you which is good. my one just broke down completely like 10 minutes ago no dsl, isdn cuts line every minute........ goddamn!

to your last question: it is easy.
when yast starts up, switch to console 2 (alt-f2). then type "mount /dev/hda1 /mnt" (adjust hda1 to your partition - fdisk -l helps alot ) and tell yast (on alt-f1) to install from an "available directory" (sorry, i only know the german names...)

Ok, cool, thanks!

i am a kinda linux warrior. i am happy if i can help others to get into it.... especially ms users

[edit]
did you know that MS pays to companies to switch from linux back to MS s***? in my point of view this is kinda mafia. just like they just threatened the "biz world" to take their new winOS from the market if people don´t stop attacking it....
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