SuSE 9.1 Professional comes on 5 installation CDs. #1 and #2 contain the basic, or "Personal" bundle. The remaining CDs 3-5 contain the optional packages, which are installed using the YaST package manager, which is somewhat similar to the Synaptic gui used with rpm and apt, except that YaST also has many other system administration functions besides package management.

Installation was fairly straightforward. Since there were only 5 GB available on the single Linux partition, the choice of packages was done carefully to keep the total size within space limits. The installation utility formatted the partition for the Reiser filesystem, and didn't seem to offer an alternative.

Installation proceeded without incident, except that the MBR was damaged, so it was necessary to rebuild it. This seems to be a common problem for dual-boot installations of the 2.6 kernel. The remedy was the same used when anaconda does the same thing when installing Fedora Core 2.

Linux detected all the hardware, even the jog dial peculiar to Sony VAIO notebooks. Clearly, the Sony VAIO line was one for which the SuSE distro had been developed and tested, and it therefore a good fit for the hardware.