Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-amd64 (126 mails)

[David Carter <dcarter@xxxxxxxxx>]

Well folks, I've been around Linux since the 0.98 kernel days and I've
never had a more frustrating install.

I've noticed from the lists that I'm not alone, with a lot of
suggestions ranging from checking the media to castrating chickens under
a full moon, but no one solution seems sufficient.

I've tried manually specifying which drive was the cdrom, removing the
CD drive from the same IDE chain, verifying the media, changing the
drivers, and even doing an FTP install, all of which claimed that I had
no packages available for installation. Finally I had to create a
partition, copy from the DVD onto it (when will it be possible to
install without installing windows first? I tried it from rescue mode
and that didn't work either!), and installing from it. All in all I
spent about 20 hours getting this loaded. My tech support case is still
pending. And have I mentioned how useful the FAQ's are?

If this OS is ever to catch on like it can and should, there need to be
a couple of things happen:
1. When you ship only on DVD, the DVD install should work. Period. This
wasn't a download.. I paid money for it. The lists suggest that this
prolem has been around for a while, so the support should be better.
2. When you have as many problems with a DVD install as this list
indicates, it's a good idea to condense these suggestions into an FAQ or
a knowledge base entry. As of 4 this morning it wasn't.

With the demise of consumer Red Hat, there's a window of opportunity
open here... especially in the AMD64 arena. I plan on using the product
for a while, but that will change if future experiences are like this
one.

And I still don't know what the problem actually was...

Dave