Hello. I’ve successfully set up an installation repository for 15.0. I have a number of installs I’d like to do, maybe over and over. Repeatably. I have this personal thing for source control. I’ve burned a DVD.
Even installing from the DVD it still attempts to download almost 2GB from the internet. I don’t want to know why. That’s just not what I want.
I would like to be able to complete an installation from the DVD and nothing more. Maybe that’s not possible. I don’t want to know why.
I would like to interrupt the installation process as early as possible in order to alter two installation repository settings as early as possible:
I want to save **all **
downloaded packages. 1. I want to reference the repository which I’ve set up containing said downloaded packages.
I don’t want updates.
I cannot find a way to do this from the DVD. How do I fix this?
(This has got to have been the worst “login/prove you love me” experience of my life!!!)
I just performed test installation of Leap 15.0 from DVD (in Next - Next - Next mode) and the only installation source is DVD, there is no attempt to download anything during installation. You need to provide more details.
Tried it twice without a network connection. Kernel panic both times, apparently related to disk I/O. Worked after I re-enabled the network connection. Approximately 2013 hardware on this one.
Let me number these for the next anecdotal observation:
network connected, tons downloaded from internet. worked.
panic
panic
network re-connected. works
#4 did not acknowledge online sources during the installation but there was a period after the install was “complete” which had clear and substantial network activity.
I don’t have a lot of time to spend on this and there is no dedicated test lab.
I’m not sure this gets me closer to having a reproducible installation source.
Are you booting DVD in UEFI mode? If not, you’ll have a Function Key menu at the bottom of the DVD’s boot screen where you can designate installation source among other things. If yes, it takes more work, typing in manually whatever is needed from https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Linuxrc.
Have you utilized the available vttys during any of these attempts? Once you’ve reached the license screen, they can be used to do various things one does when one knows how using the cli, such as mounting a partition to an arbitrary location, running lspci, or collecting output from save_y2logs.
If you provide some information about your hardware, maybe someone here can suggest something to try. lspci output would be a start. Content of /var/log/Xorg.0.log would be good, or at least
egrep -i "\(EE\)|onnec" /var/log/Xorg.0.log
output.
I just booted the 15.0 DVD on a 10 year old PC with no UEFI possible and ethernet cable unplugged. It reached the license screen without apparent complaint or panic. When were your panics occurring?
If you repeatedly need to set up many similar installations, you might look into AutoYaST (maybe in tandem with KIWI). It’s XML-based, and it lets you have detailed control over anything during setup, e.g. IP address, repositories to use, post-install scripts to execute etc. You can generate an AutoYaST profile from an existing working installation and go from there. A major government organisation in Germany where I happened to work for a while uses AutoYaST for virtually all SLES systems. It’s one of the largest SuSE installations in Europe, I’ve been told by a SuSE consultant back in 2012.
In the installer there should be an option to edit the repos configured, Enter that and disable all but the dvd, next proceed with the install. To create a repo from the DVD, put the ISO somewhere, and use YaST’s repomanager to add that the iso as a repo. Remove the one pointing to DVD / USB.
Are you sure you created a DVD? What is the size of your image file?
AutoYaST should be great for a fully unattended “zero touch” install which would be required Enterprise networking because of the large number of machines. If you’re a small to medium size shop like what I deal with, then you might find a partially automated install more appropriate, the base install can be manual because there might be almost no difference vs the time required to set up answer files, then once you have your basic install completed run a script to install and configure everything else. I have posted some of the most useful commands I use in such scripts on my Wiki
What kind of repository did you set up? If it’s a mirror of the OSS, you should be able to point to that for your installation and you shouldn’t need to point to Internet repos, in fact if you do this you should probably be able to point a Net Install to your LAN repo… You might go to the trouble of creating your own custom Net install or I’d expect you could use a regular Net install but disable/decline all standard repos and add your own.
Anything that would allow others to understated what you did and potentially try to replicate it. So far it is not even clear what “DVD” are you talking about.
Default installer workflow indeed adds add-on repositories after package installation has completed, does refresh these repositories and installs any updated packages available in these repositories.
This happens after user confirmation, one has to confirm installation of additional packages. So it hardly can go unnoticed.
In case of openSUSE online repositories are handled like “add-on”; control.xml file on installation medium lists default repositories (and URL to fetch updated list).
This workflow skips update repositories (on assumption that this will be handled by installed system later).
So without any explicit extra add-ons nothing should be installed as package versions in online repositories are the same as on DVD.
To summarize - when installing using normal product DVD the only network activity is to refresh default openSUSE online repositories (oss, non-oss and their update counterparts). It certainly is not “a lot of”, definitely not in order of gigabytes mentioned in original post.
In any case, after installation there is YaST log which contains detailed steps which has been performed and which allows tracing what and why has been downloaded. Although I’m afraid it falls under “I don’t want to know why” …
This thread is now two pages long? Yikes! I’m back with some answers. If someone wants to ask a specific and clear question at this point that’s fine.
This box has an NVIDIA graphics card that’s still good hardware even though it’s a few years old. That was causing issues, I knew that. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes what looks like a bad disk is just a bad disk: turned out the disk was failing too. Replaced that.
@nrickert: Unplugging the network cable is an elegant solution, so simple!
Notwithstanding, it was downloading lots of stuff during the install, not talking about repo manifests, talking about actual packages. Dunno why.
To paraphrase Freud again, sometimes an installation DVD is an installation DVD. I was able to complete a base graphical installation (with KDE) from the DVD, with the network cable unplugged. Don’t ask for specifics on the DVD ISO (md5 sum), because I lost it when I replaced the disk. I had downloaded from the opensuse downloads page. I’d used it for a previous install (different, newer hardware; no NVIDIA card) where it also pulled stuff from online repos during the install process. I do still have the actual DVD.
So here’s what I did:
Unplugged the network cable. :-p
Started an install from the DVD.
Chose the base KDE desktop no additional packages just the bare minimum, with text input target (warnings from the installer!).
Followed the CUDA installation instructions https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux/index.html (actually I downloaded an engrossed PDF from somewhere on NVIDIA’s site, but this looks like the Linux-specific material) to blacklist nouveau and rebuild initrd.
Used (text mode) yast to change to the graphical boot target.
Rebooted.
Plugged the network cable back in and configured the interface.
Installed gcc 7 (what the kernel for 15.0 is compiled with according to /proc/version) and the kernel headers.
Installed the cuda-10-0 meta package with YaST2, which pulls in your grandmother and the kitchen sink. WARNING: It’s well over one GB to download!
Followed the installation instructions for setting PATH and group permissions.
Looks really good. Installs the display drivers as well, and all pieces version compatible (I’d run into this a few years ago where I installed the display driver first and then the CUDA driver and sound never worked after that). The instructions that NVIDIA points to on SuSE’s web site for installing the display driver are woefully out of date. I’d strongly encourage anyone who wants the display driver to use the CUDA instructions unless the download size is prohibitive… and besides you might want the CUDA capabilities some day.
Does anyone want instructions on setting up a local repo?
He’s a sharp cookie, but I’ll bet he borrowed the concept from the very part-time (less than once a month average) Windows using community, where it’s necessary to prevent Windows from hijacking control in order to install another 1-5 hours’ worth of updates before allowing use of the PC for maybe 5 minutes of needed actual Windows work. It’s really annoying when I forget to unplug the cable before allowing Windows to boot.
