12.1RC1 and Acer Travelmate problems

Hi all,

Tried to install the beta on an Acer Travelmate 5740G last night. Dual boot: Win7 and openSUSE 12.1beta on one HD.

Here my findings:

  • put the CD in and switched on the Travelmate
  • menu appears -> selected a new installation
  • It takes ages - 10 minutes thereabbout - until it leaves the “openSUSE” banner screen, loads the installation system and opens the “this is a beta version - ok ?” window. Ok, go on.
  • Selected English language, German keyboard layout
  • Installation starts with system probing
  • Stucks again at 60% for minutes at “Search for Linux partitions”
  • Continues to time zone (Germany) and desktop selection (KDE)
  • Hovers again motionless somewhere in itself for minutes, only the cursor is turning its wheel still showing the desktop selection screen…

… went out for dinner, left the turning cursor alone. Came back:

  • Editing partition setup goes fine
  • Typed in user name and login: ok
  • Summary: “Grub and MBR” notice in red: the system might not boot at all but there should be an error message when installing grub (I haven’t seen this message later on).
  • Performs installation: it starts, but after a few seconds again, it hovers somewhere in the nowhere for minutes before continuing slowly. It takes about 15 minutes to reach 6%.
  • After a while it continues faster and finishes after 50 minutes.
  • It tries to restart: failed.
  • Turned the PC off, removed the DVD, turned it on: the grub menu appears, than the start screen, it disappears: that’s it: black screen.

Conclusion: installation takes by far too long - you never know if it is dead or continues at some time, not unusable finally.

No such issues with openSUSE, 11.3, 11.4 (not considering the bug with the missing atm-lib) and Ubuntu 11.10, all 64 bit.

Before I start to open bug reports: any ideas what I’m missing perhaps ?

Thanks,
Steve

Did you do
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10573557/11.4_Install/1_mediacheck.jpg

Media check says “No errors found.”

There is a bug in the 12.1 beta dvd
Use a live cd

Thanks for this hint.

No, I don’t spend more time on this: installation is basic stuff and we are talking about a RC. If this is a known issue, the buggy images should be removed from the download servers to avoid wasting the time of the testers.

Steve.