While it is great that openSuse has their own installer, some of us (me) would appriciate to install it from a DE such as KDE both for testing the distro first and since the installer provided does not have accessibility features compared to a DE. I am aware that in the website, there are live installers with KDE and GNOME; but, the website explicitly tells us to not use them. Is there another solution?
Also will the new Plasma Welcome Setup Wizard come to openSuse?
Not sure what you read but you can perfectly run a Live office to to see if you like the distro and test things.
What is not possible is to use the Live image to also install the system, for that you have to download a separate install image.
I did see the Plasma Welcome Setup Wizard when I did a new install. Checking here it looks to you can trigger it using sudo systemd-sysusers
Plasma-Welcome and Plasma-Setup are two different things.
Plasma-Setup is not yet in the openSUSE main repositories, so I’m not sure how you managed to get it showing up on install, on any openSUSE installation ISO, unless it’s something you put together yourself.
plasma-setup makes sense for distributions without own installer (i couldn’t name one without own installer out of memory). Or KDE‘s own distributions. It only covers language, timezone, keyboard, user creation. network setup. So not even a full installer which covers package installation, partitioning, encryption and so on.
From a quick view over the KDE invent page, it looks like it is tailored for KDE Plasma (didn’t take a deep look). What about all the other DEs and window managers openSUSE offers?
It is quite unlikely that plasma-setup will replace any installer part in openSUSE, now that Agama is in full developement.
Maybe it will be available in a (devel) repo, so that you can spin your own ISO or it may be an option for distributions like Kalpa (maybe?). But this can best be commented by @sfalken
Plasma-setup provides the same functionality that Gnome-Initial-Setup does on Aeon, and makes the installation more like Windows or MacOS, which has many benefits, particularly if you’re setting up computers for somebody else.
All the installer does, in that usecase is get the system installed on the machine. Then when the user boots for the first time, they do the User setup, timezone, etc.
Right now, using YaST2-installer, Agama, or most other linux installers, that quite literally requires whomever is installing the system, to have end user information, in order to do that install, or to ship the machine with some sort of “dummy” account.
This is pretty much a no-go, if you want to get into the business of shipping linux pre-installs.
It’s not impossible to work around, but it does add a layer of complexity. I don’t actually know how Ubuntu pre-installs from Lenovo or Dell are handled, I assume they use G-I-S, as Ubuntu ships the GNOME desktop by default.
Kalpa will absolutely be switching to Plasma-Setup when it’s available.
Sorry for not replying to this thread much earlier; but, I would really appriciate Plasma Setup since it feels way nicer then other installers I used.
Now let me speak about the Yast installer situation, in my initial post, I wanted to be a bit vague to not speak about this directly; but, I guess I have to. I have an visual impairement which makes it difficult for me to see the installer that openSuse uses. That is why I was wondering whether we have an installer from Live Desktop since their accessibility tools are more than enough to assist in that process. Also, I would appriciate if the install process is not like installing Arch since it is a bit involved.
Maybe let’s try turning this around: You want this because you need accessability tools. OK. YaST has some of them like
So what exactly do you need?
And there is also the QT_SCALE_FACTOR environment variable (and some others) that you can set to get larger fonts:
You can also install Tumbleweed with any of the recent Agama ISOs; that will boot you right into Agama running in a Firefox browser where you can use all the Firefox accessibility features, including the usual Ctrl + / Ctrl - or Mouse Wheel + or - to zoom.
I need a system magnifier that would allow me to zoom into a portion of the screen and which would follow my cursor.
I did create a install media test this out; but, was not able to find a UI option for it, nor setting the variable on Yast shell or normal shell did anything. How can I even achieve this?
I did not see these on the initial part of the installer neither and there begins the problem: I interact with the installer in a limited fashion; but, need an accessibility tool to actually complete such a complex installer. And what makes an accessibility feature accessible is that they are easy to find or there are various shortcuts so that people do not need to find them. You should give me explicit instructions on how to find these so that I can try them.
While I found the Agama installer, it is from a Github domain, which makes me ask whether the project is related or is under the ambrella of openSuse or is it stable to use?
Simple things first:
Agama is the official successor project to YaST, written by the SUSE installer team (formerly known as YaST team). It’s already the official installer for openSUSE Leap 16.0 and SLES 16.0.
For openSUSE Tumbleweed / Slowroll, there is still YaST2, and it’s still the main installer, but Agama is available in parallel; you can choose Tumbleweed alongside other openSUSE distributions from Agama.
The official website for Agama is
which is generated from its GitHub project. The download page there links to its OBS project here. As you can see from the ISO sizes, those are what is now called an Agama live system (formerly known as inst-sys in YaST times) with only 0.8 GiB (~800 MiB) that contains just enough to boot a minimal openSUSE with Wayland and on top of that Firefox and running inside it Agama. The actual distribution to install is loaded over the network from there.
IMHO for you this is the simplest approach since you can effectively boot directly boot into the installer inside Firefox, and you can use the usual Firefox key combinations directly from there to increase fonts and the user interface in general.
Caveat: If you have an NVidia graphics card, you might need the nomodeset kernel parameter to prevent a black screen. But you can try without that first to see if it’s really needed with your graphics card.
All the other options that I mentioned based on YaST all need some command line interaction which might be difficult if the font is already too small for you to read at that point.
HTH
If you have another machine (a laptop, for example), you can use the traditional YaST installer with the default Tumbleweed ISO for a remote installation via ssh.
For that, boot the machine that you want to install with these additional boot parameters:
ssh=1 sshpassword=root
(or choose another root password that you like)
To get to this point, select “Installation” from the boot menu, then hit e to edit the boot command line and add ssh=1 sshpassword=root. Get out of that editor with F10, then boot with that entry.
The ISO will then boot up to the network setup, where it tells you the IP address that it received from your local DNS. You need that IP to log in via ssh:
Once it gets to this point, log in from your laptop or other machine; you can do that from the comfort of your KDE session that has all the accessibility features that you need. Use that password that you set with sshpassword=....
In my example, I started it from an Xfce4 terminal window, and I supplied the QT_SCALE_FACTOR directly:
I.e.
ssh -X root@192.168.178.189
Then accept the ssh fingerprint. Ignore that message “/usr/bin/xauth: file /root/.Xauthority does not exist”.
Now set the scale factor that you need:
export QT_SCALE_FACTOR=2.0
Fractional numbers like 1.5 or 1.75 may or may not work. 2.0 or 3.0 etc. are a safe bet.
Now start the installer:
yast.ssh
And you’ll get a really huge YaST window:
Notice: The keyboard layout from here will be temporarily (until the X11 or Wayland session restart) applied to your host system (the laptop) as well, so make sure you select the one that you are comfortable with.
Now click through the installation as usual.
So, did you try any of the proposed solutions?
Sorry for the wait, I did try the Agama installer; but, I was not able to use it, I had trouble connecting it to the WIFI since there were no configuration options, does it only support ethernet? Also the fact that zoom affect not affecting the cursor was annoying; but, I cannot be that picky and it is the expected behavior from Firefox. I do not have reliable secondary machine that I can use to make a ssh setup. Also the initial steps you have shown would be harder then the install since the cli has way smaller text than YAST; however, I am thankful for the effort you put in to explain how to set it up with ssh.
I tried to install Leap since it had the Agama installer offline, yet when I completed the install and rebooted, the grub failed to unlock the LUKS volume (I used default partitioning minus swap). Did anyone tested this with encryption since the end result looked very borked (it only displayed a bare grub prompt with no feedback while and after inserting the password)
