Installation of Tumbleweed dated 2016-01-12

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

I created my flashdrive with the following command

dd if=openSUSE-Tumbleweed-DVD-x86_64-Snapshot20160112-Media.iso of=/dev/sdf bs=1M && sync

My flashdrive is on /dev/sdf

The flashdrive booted correctly.

There are several problems that I encountered. One at the beginning was the keyboard selection. I chose Canada French, and got some gibberish.

Then, I have a popup to ask about cd, and many other choices, including a http link. I did not find any information or installation guide to help me choose from the options.
In the end I selected the entry with the http link.

At that point, it appeared to me that the DVD version of Tumbleweed was doing a network installation. I could not tell as the particular flashdrive I was using did not have a LED light. In any event, I am looking for an installation guide, if that is possible to find.

I have 4 Linux systems on my computer (one per each disk). Each has its own swap space, yet TW chose to list all the swap files, including the one it made for itself into the /etc/fstab It only showed the swaps by UUID value, so deciding which swaps to remove from the fstab is a post boot chore.

I am using KDE on TW. My other systems have xfce, Gnome, and Ubuntu. I have been using Google to locate an installation guide, but there is none. I have perused the release notes, but since TW is a rolling release, I doubt that these notes are up-to-date.

I did succeed once installed, from the command line to setup sudo, and subsequently run sudo localectl set-x11-keymap ca, us and sudo localectl set-keymap ca, us.
Can I consider TW or Leap 42-1 as being stable, given it has the same installation problems?

#2

That layout is broken at the moment. A fix has been submitted, but is not in Tumbleweed yet as of 2016-01-12 (it has been submitted on 2016-01-13, but it also has to pass through review, staging and testing before actually being in Tumbleweed).
See http://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=960307

Then, I have a popup to ask about cd, and many other choices, including a http link. I did not find any information or installation guide to help me choose from the options.
In the end I selected the entry with the http link.

This means that it cannot access the repo (which is included on the DVD).
So the DVD is “broken”. I don’t know if there’s a general problem with this at the moment or something went wrong with your download or the process of copying it to the USB drive.

Somebody else had a similar problem recently…
Using the NET-install ISO worked for him.

Just a note: the DVD image is bigger than 4GiB, the maximum filesize for the FAT filesystem. Downloading/copying it to a FAT formatted partition will destroy it!

At that point, it appeared to me that the DVD version of Tumbleweed was doing a network installation.

Probably, yes.
If you told it to use the online repo as installation source, it did a “network installation” obviously.

I have 4 Linux systems on my computer (one per each disk). Each has its own swap space, yet TW chose to list all the swap files, including the one it made for itself into the /etc/fstab It only showed the swaps by UUID value, so deciding which swaps to remove from the fstab is a post boot chore.

File a bug report.
But I do think it’s possble to choose which swap partitions to use (or not use) in the installer somewhere.

Never had a need to do that myself though, all my fresh Tumbleweed (or any other versions for that matter) installs were made on fresh hard disks without any existing Linux partitions.
So I might be wrong.

Can I consider TW or Leap 42-1 as being stable, given it has the same installation problems?

Depends on what you mean with “stable”.
Tumbleweed is definitely NOT stable in the sense of “it doesn’t change”. It changes all the time, today’s installation DVD might be totally outdated tomorrow, and will definitely be next month.
Leap is indeed stable in that regard, it is a conventional release.

Both should run stable, but that doesn’t mean you cannot possibly encounter problems. Especially with Tumbleweed, which changes constantly and is always updated to the latest package versions.
Both are actually running through automated tests before being released, the tests include fresh installations and upgrades from previous versions. But obviously not every possible situation can be tested, so there still might be installation “issues” on your particular hardware/system.
The only way to possibly get them fixed is by filing a bug report, or fixing them yourself (it might be some corner case) and submitting the fix (this is open source after all).