i just downloaded 11 gigs of SuSE to my hard drive, now i'm wondering how i should install it. is there a procedure to distribute the files on cds? or is my only choice to install from the HD?

Unless you downloaded them as iso images to burn and then they act like a regular copy install distro style whatever.....
anyways, its probably best for you to install from hard drive.

Why did you download all that ??? do you need to install all that at the same time ??? My server runs RedHat 7.0 and the installation cost me 2 gigs which is alot in my opinion???Just curious, why haven't you just download the basic system and then added stuff as needed...When it comes to linux stuff change all the time....

that's the only thing they let you download... i think? =)
check out suse.com =)

Well, did you download everything from their FTP site. I don't think you have to download everything. suse usually ships with only like 5 gigs total, and even that is alot. My install of Redhat only was about 450 megs and I have plenty with just that almost.

well, not everything from the *site*. everything from their installation dir. but they don't tell you anything about how to separate the stuff you don't need. and what sucks is that it's not ISOs. that'd be much easier. i'm not sure what distro to use now...
hey, does slackware use rpms? (i've only had mandrake, redhat, and suse so far, can anyone suggest something else that's good, and explain why?) thanks!

If you want ISO's, go here: http://www.linuxiso.org

yea, i know the site, thanks.
it doesn't have anything that's not available from the original vendor.
like suse only gives out the live evaluation iso. that installs on your windows partition, and i think needs the cd to run everytime.

Yep! The SuSe Live! Eval thing works like Mandrake's Lin4Win - it makes a huge file on your C drive and mounts that file as a complete filesystem. It is nightmarishly slow! Good for complete newbies, as if they can't be bothered (shame on them) then they can just delete the files!

Slackware doesn't use RPMs. It uses '.tar.gz' files, but there is a conversion utility that comes with it, called (helpfully enough) rpm2targz.

Have only ever tried SlackWare Linux once, many many moons ago when MS were still on DOS & Win 3! Sorry can't be of much help on it.

Have tried Mandrake (7.1 & 7.2), RH (various) and that annoying SuSe Live Eval! Have also tried Turbo Linux before now, but I couldn't get it to work. Looks good from the screenshots though.

Have just checked the SlackWare Homepage and it says that it also supports this filesystem-within-a-file approach, as wells as SlackWare bootable ZipDisks, etc.

Good luck.