Actually this is a success story to give you the ending first.
This laptop (Dell Inspiron 700m) has worked nearly flawlessly with previous releases so it’s not a surprise to me that everything came up ok. (I think the SD reader doesn’t work, but I don’t care about that.)
The only thing that puzzled me is that when I booted with the KDE Live CD i686 and selected Installation, it took a long time to start the installer, and when it did it warned me that I had less than 1GB RAM. The machine does have 1GB RAM but I think a few MB are stolen for the video. So I went ahead. However it was very slow at copying the root image to the disk. I just let it run and it finished over an hour later and everything was fine.
So I’m just wondering if 11.3 KDE Live CD is slow to install for other people too. openSUSE used to be very speedy at installation.
I suppose I could repeat the install with the Net CD or the DVD but I don’t have those yet and it works fine so I’d rather do something more interesting. With the age of this machine (~5 years) this may be the last install I put on it.
I’ll try the DVD on a 64-bit machine for another data point when I have the image and report again.
did you install from the first green boot screen, or did you let it
boot to the desktop and then click the install icon?
if the latter then i think there is a good deal of RAM tied up with
the X running a full system and then the install script on top and i
think i read somewhere that that will take about 1GB of RAM to pull
off…if that is what you did i’d guess the machine was swapping a lot…
In case anyone else reading this thread actually had a RAM problem installing the liveCD, one can install using a text mode which will still give a graphical GUI in the end. Here is a rather basic guide here: Text mode install from liveCD … It was created using openSUSE-11.2 but it applies equally to openSUSE-11.3.
LiveCD installation of openSUSE is quite fast; the whole process of a new install (starting from beginning of the writing of changes to hard disk and ending at the completion of automatic config) takes only about 25 minutes on my machine, which is about 4 years old with a modest hard drive and an old type of DDR2 memory. Still, YMMV.