I wanted to give openSuse Tumbleweed a try after reading a lot of good things about it. Tried the Live CD but it wouldn’t boot because of some issue with journald service. So I decided to go for an installation and downloaded the DVD installation ISO and wrote it to a usb drive using dd with bs=4M as suggested on the wiki. After booting, it asks me to “make sure your installation medium is available” and gives the following options:
cd:/
hd:/ http://download.opensuse.org/tumbleweed/repo/oss
Enter another URL
Selecting cd:/ or hd:/ does nothing. if i go back to main menu and select “Start Installation”, it asks me to select installation medium and lists only CD drive, hard disk and network. usb drive does not show up.
Then I tried going to the “Expert” menu and selected the option to check installation medium. On selecting /dev/sdb, I got the message that this is not an openSuse medium.
What am I missing here? I have never had so much difficulty installing any distro.
Just to rule out the most obvious mistake here:
Which target device did you specify for dd?
It has to be the USB device itself (i.e. something like /dev/sdb), not some partition on it (e.g. /dev/sdb1).
Another common mistake is downloading or copying the ISO file to a FAT (i.e. MSDOS) formatted partition. FAT only supports files upto 4 GiB, the DVD ISO is bigger. Copying it to a FAT filesystem will destroy it.
PS: you might also try the NET-Install ISO, which is quite small as it downloads everything from the Internet. It can be put to an USB drive in the same way.
But for this to work, you obviously need a working Internet connection during installation. In particular your network card must be supported out-of-the-box, which might not be the case especially if it is a wireless card.
@wolfi323: yes i used /dev/sdb. seems to be some issue with LiveCD and DVD, but the NET install is working fine so trying with that. however, it tells me that i don’t have sufficient space to enable snapshots. Not sure how much space is required for it. Current partition size is 40 GB
Well, there might indeed be (or have been) a problem with the LiveCD and DVD, I heard other people being unsuccessful too.
No idea if those are fixed or not.
If the latest DVD does not work, you should probably file a bug report. But AFAIK installation from the DVD is even tested in openQA, so it should actually work all the time (unless there’s a problem with your particular hardware or something like that…).
however, it tells me that i don’t have sufficient space to enable snapshots. Not sure how much space is required for it.
Well, it’s not that you actually require space for enabling snapshots, but the smaller the partition is the greater the chance it runs full before snapshots are cleaned up.
When I last looked, the defaults were to disable snapshots if the root partition is smaller than 10 GiB (I think), but the defaults probably have changed meanwhile because people complained about their installations running out of space all the time (which can result in not being able to login, or not even being able to boot), especially on Tumbleweed.
You can always turn on snapshots afterwards though, even if the installer doesn’t let you.
Although 40GiB probably is the absulute recommended minimum, it might be too small especially on Tumbleweed.
