openSUSE 12.2 installation abnormality :/

English Install/Boot/Login
#1

Hi folks,

I’d like to start by offering my congratulations to all of the people involved in the openSUSE 12.2 release. While I know there were time delays and various hurdles to overcome, I for one am very pleased with what you guys and gals have produced. Admittedly I’ve only had the distro running on my laptop for a day or so now, but still, first impressions count, right?

In the hope that it’s useful, I wanted to highlight an abnormality I noticed during the 12.2 installation process (this post might therefore be considered a bug report - apologies if I should have posted elsewhere).

Having downloaded the KDE LiveCD.iso of 12.2, I transferred this to a 2gb PNY USB stick using the classical ‘dd’ commands in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. I then fired up my laptop with the LiveUSB inserted and, as expected, was greeted with the various openSUSE start-up options (run openSUSE/install/check media etc.). Knowing that I wanted to take the distro for a spin, I selected the ‘installation’ option and proceeded through the Yast installation process. It was during the copying of the live disk image and root filesystem that an error seemed to repeatedly occur - something along the lines of the yast_init finisher encountering an error, after which the installation would hang (this occurred around ~44% of the image copy process).

Suspecting that my download of the 12.2 image had somehow become corrupted, I proceeded to re-download the full KDE-LiveCD image and then repeated the above procedure. Again, during installation I encountered the same error (note: the USB drive had been used the day previously to install another linux distro without error, so I think I can discount a USB drive error).

Becoming increasingly baffled, I then rebooted the system and selected the option to run a live openSUSE session. From here, I then selected installation and, as before, progressed through the various steps. To my amazement, installation via this route occurred without any issue - I type this from the installed and updated distro.

I’m not sure what caused the error, but I hope that highlighting it might be of use to anyone involved in the openSUSE installation wizardry.

My hardware:

Acer Aspire 5735Z
Intel Pentium dual-core processor T3400 (2.16 GHz, 667 MHz FSB, 1 MB L2 cache)
15.6" HD Acer Cinecrystal LCD
Up to 1244 MB Mobile Intel Graphics
3 GB DDR2
250 GB HDD (Hitachi, ATA)

Laters,
MJ :slight_smile:

#2

Interesting.

When I last installed opensuse from the live image, that went well (I think it was 11.4). However, I had written the image to a CD. Since switching to the use of USBs for installation, I have only used the DVD image for installing opensuse. I have, however, used a live image on USB for both Fedora and Mint.

I didn’t take notes at the time, so my memory might be a bit hazy. I seem to recall that I ran into problems with Fedora. So, I booted into the live image and installed from there.

With mint, the install hung part way. On a hunch, I ran “isohybrid” on the live image, and rewrote that to a USB. (Actually, I only updated the first few sectors of the existing USB, using “dd” and “count=”, since “isohybrid” only affects the beginning of the image). And, after using “isohybrid”, the Mint install went well.

My suspicion is that there is something about the live images that doesn’t quite work properly on a USB but does work on a CD or DVD. Perhaps that is what you are finding with opensuse.