28 Oct 2006 (updated 30 Oct 2006 at 10:07 UTC)
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Installing SUSE 10.1 - or not
Having failed to complete installation for the third,
fourth, fifth (honestly, I've lost count) time, I snapped
and went into
#suse on Freenode.
The SNR is #suse is reasonably tolerable - not as good as
#freenode-social, not as bad as #ubuntu - so I went off to
play games for a while with the thought of reading the
scrollback to see if anything interesting had happened.
So about an hour later, I read through everything that's
been happening, and I see all this stuff about using smart instead of YaST and
comments that "package management is horribly broken". And
then I see that the in-channel bot's advice on 10.1 is the
following:
For information regarding the issues most users
experience with SuSE 10.1 and how you can fix them, Please
read the conversation posted here: http://spinink.net/conversation-with-new-suse-user/
The summary is quite bleak:
Novell has done what may be irreparable damage
to SuSE Linux by releasing 10.1 WAY before it was ready for
public consumption. I understand the need to get 10.1 out so
that they could work out issues with the new package
management libraries before the release of SLED 10, but this
does not excuse their actions. Novell was extremely slow to
respond to these issues after the 10.1 release. In fact, I
would argue that they were completely ignoring the giant
pink elephant in the room. The motto for 10.1 should be
'Novell SuSE Linux 10.1, We Bring You In With XGL and Send
You Packing with Our Package Management.'
In their defence, SUSE people like
Marcus have
replied to
the effect of "well, we either release it with bugs, or
don't release it at all". OK, I've studied project
management. I understand where he's coming from. The problem
is fixable, and openSUSE 10.2 will come out in
December. Still sucks though...
Anyway, I think I might have solved the installation
problem: not enough RAM. The install should work if I
enable /swap during installation; if it doesn't, I'll
install Kubuntu...
(Thanks to aka_druid and sPiN for identifying that and
suggesting the fix, and thanks to sPiN for the article; now
all I need to do is file the relevant bug
against YaST
to "enable swap during install if present" bang my head
against a brick wall...)
Edit: Turns out swap was enabled. Maybe I just
need more of it. Oh well, I'll get myself a Kubunutu ISO...