11.2 Installation Fun ...

English Install/Boot/Login
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I’ve never had this much trouble with an OpenSuse installation before. Let me disclaim up front, though, that I’m trying it in a VirtualBox before actually installing it to my hard drive. That very well could be the difference.

For the record, I’ve accepted all of the defaults from VirtualBox 3.0.4 for the virtual machine, which presents a single AMD Athlon 64 CPU to the OS, with 1.8 gig of RAM and 12 gig of hard drive. USB is disabled, floppy is disabled, the ISOs are mounted as drives and network is set to NAT.

My first try was with the 11.2 x64 DVD. I used the “DownThemAll!” addon for Firefox to let it download all night; the MD5 sum didn’t match. :frowning: I didn’t even try that one (and didn’t want to waste another 8 hours downloading – not yet).

Second try was the Opensuse 11.2 x64 Net Install. I downloaded the ISO, mounted in the VM and started it up. Everything seemed to go just fine until the final stages, during automatic configuration. It hung at 18%/64%. I finally had to stop the VM and reboot. This time, I chose manual configuration. Same result.

General note to the Linux community (not just OpenSUSE): one of Linux’s banes continues to be terrible error reporting. Nothing is more confusing to a new user than for something just to hang, or not start, or not work, with no way to break out of it and no meaningful error message.

OK, back to the install: I downloaded the Opensuse 11.2 x64 Live CD. Here’s the interesting part: I can run off the live CD just fine. Everything seems to work (and looks good, by the way!). But as soon as I select “Install …” … … … yep, I get to “18%/64%” and it hangs. The mouse cursor is movable, and I’ve got the little “busy” cursor (it keeps spinning), so I know the CPU and core OS are running. But that’s it. We have to crash the VM and restart.

For now, I’m just running it as a Live CD in that VM. I’m afraid to take the time to backup, install and then restore directly to the hard drive until I know that this isn’t just a VM-related issue.

Had no trouble installing 11.1 on this hardware, so I think 11.2 should work. But if anyone has suggestions or ideas, I appreciate it.

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Is it possible you can carve out a small partition on your harddrive to do a duel installation for testing? That’s what I did with my laptop. It had Vista on it and I used system-rescue-cd and gparted to create a 50 gig partition at the end of the drive. Installed 11.2 and I’m tickled pink with it. If you do that and use LVM, once you do your testing you can migrate your data to the new setup and just add the partitions from your old installation to your new volume group and you’re all done.

Dave

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x86_64 is broken in VirtualBox - Bugzilla; https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=551588

11.2 has been fine on all boxes I’ve tried so far. Real smooth.

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Thanks, that’s my answer, because that’s basically what’s happening in my case. I didn’t know.

I’ll make room on a spare partition and try a for-real install. 11.2 really looks good, and I want to try it.

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I’ve never had machines running this great.

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So far, so excellent. Installing from the 11.2 x64 Live CD worked like a charm. :slight_smile:

I thought I would hate KDE 4.3, but they seem to have finally worked the wrinkles out of it. I don’t even mind Dolphin (referring to another thread that I spotted here earlier). In fact, in time, I might come to like it.

The only problem (touched on in another thread by yours truly in the Hardware section) was that the NVidia driver install downloaded 650 Megabytes of stuff – it basically did a complete re-installation. Weird.

But let’s keep playing and see how we like it. So far, so good. :slight_smile: