I decided to reinstall Tumbleweed on my old 32-bit laptop. So far it was running fine but the root partition was a bit too small and during updates it filled up. So I decided to reinstall all instead of playing with partition tools etc.
However during my first 2 attempts (in graphical mode) the installation failed at the stage where the partitions had to be formatted. There was additional info in the console that there was not enough memory (512mb RAM) which is strange considering that this PC was running fine with XFCE so far.
Anyway I restarted the installation and this time I chose text mode and again I chose the XFCE as DE. I also chose again to install the packages:
mc
mlocate
php5
php5-mysql
yast2-http-server
(and they added their dependencies)
Now formatting of partitions went fine, however right after mounting /home the installer said:
Insert 'openSUSE-20151116-0' (Disk 1)'
(and in show details):
File '/images/11-meta-i386.tar.xz' not found on... (the DVD drive)
[Retry] [Abort] [Skip] [Eject]
But the disc is in the drive (obviously) and Retry doesn’t help. The DVD was downloaded without problems, the SHA256 checksum checked ok and I recorded the DVD in k3b with the option to verify the disc after burning. So the DVD drive is healthy.
I have never seen this during installation. What am I to do?
Run the check media function. DVD can and do go bad.
512 meg is really marginal. Are you using a live iso or a the full installer.
If live do not install from a desktop select install in the boot menu.
BTW you probably want EXT4 for root partition the default is BTRFS and it will use extra space because of the snapper utility included.This takes snapshots periodical of the FS (more like a dif) so it should be turned off or use EXT4 on marginal systems
As a workaround, use the Network installation CD, this one should work.
Or wait for the next snapshot, apparently it has been fixed already.
Or install the 64bit version instead, if you have a 64bit CPU…
Regarding the error about not enough RAM: create a swap partition. The installer should offer you to use that.
512 MB are not enough for the graphical installer since years.
Even 13.1 just hanged during installation when I tried to install it in VirtualBox with only 512MiB RAM given to the guest 2 years ago.
768MiB should be enough in any case though, never had problems with that.
You have to consider that the installer needs to keep all information about all 8000 packages (and in particular the dependencies) in RAM. 512MiB are quite narrow for that, in particular if you also run a graphical session at the same time.
That’s really strange. This old laptop was running 12.2, then 13.1 and then Tumbleweed (since April 2015) - both installed using the graphical installer. I haven’t tried in TW but the previous versions could even run KDE (although not quite fast). I might have had some extraordinary luck or who knows what.
I installed SuSE 8.1 and ran it with KDE3 with only 256 MiB. I even ran later versions with KDE4 with only 256 MiB RAM.
If more memory is needed than RAM is available, the system will use the swap instead (which is much slower of course).
But if no swap is available, random programs will just crash/be killed if they run out of RAM.
BTW since your message I have started a NET install (in text mode) and it is still “Loading installation system (2/5)” although I picked the fastest mirror available (from which on my other machine I can download with 15mb/s).
I wonder why this process is so slow and why the installer doesn’t utilize the full 100mbps of the laptop’s network card.
It downloads everything from the Servers, even the installer (YaST) it self.
I wonder why this process is so slow and why the installer doesn’t utilize the full 100mbps of the laptop’s network card.
???
It probably does utilize the full 100mbps of the laptop’s network card.
But you can only download data from a server at the speed that the server sends it to you, obviously.
Hm. But I can download the full DVD iso at 15mb/s on the other machine (same network). At the same time on the laptop during installation I can see certain files in the progress bar downloading at 25kb/s and it is taking for ages and that “2/5” thing took more than 30 minutes itself.
As you can see there are some peculiar 404 errors, i.e. the installer is looking for files which are not there.
Is the installer broken or am I breaking something?
P.S. Some minutes later an out of memory message showed too (last screenshot). I wonder how come suddenly TW became non-installable on a computer which ran it for months.
Indeed. No idea, another person (also hit by that problem with the 32bit ISO) reported success a few days ago.
I might give it a try myself later…
P.S. Some minutes later an out of memory message showed too (last screenshot). I wonder how come suddenly TW became non-installable on a computer which ran it for months.
Again, there is a difference between running the installed system, and installing the system.
Running the system might need much less RAM than the (graphical) installer, depending on the desktop environment and the applications you use of course. And you have swap available which isn’t there during the installation I think (unless you activate it manually).
To be sure, press Alt+F2 to switch to a text mode terminal and run “swapon /dev/sdX”.
As I wrote, IME the 13.1 and 13.2 installers did hang/crash manually (at random points during the installation) with only 512 MiB RAM. I haven’t tried with less than 768 MiB since then though, so I am not sure about the current state.
I confirm. Download at this stage is extremely slow, to the extent I several times simply killed VM thinking it is hung. It does not matter what I use QEMU(KVM), VB, VMware.
After all the travail I decided to try to install 13.2 (using net installer) with the cunning idea to make a zypper dup upgrade after that.
Exactly 5 hours ago I started it and everything works. I have tried only text mode. However:
It seems there is a problem with the network connection speed of the laptop because even after the installation finished and booted in 13.2 I can’t download with more than 25-30Kb/s
How can I fix this before doing any upgrade to TW? This is Acer Travelmate 2410 and the network card is 10/100Mbps.
sweet. Thanks for the info.
Otherwise I would install Leap.