Hi, There were some concerns what's behind "Image based installation" that you may hear related to Alpha3+, so I would like to explain shortly what it means and how it may affect bug reports you see. The whole story is a bit longer, but basically Lukas Ocilka, Steffen Winterfeld and me had mexican dinner in Prague downtown - and it turned out to be a productive meeting :) The idea was: installing a live system is about twice as fast as an rpm based install and there has to be a way to use that fact for a "normal" DVD. So we decided it has to be simple to install a basic system from tar and then treat the installed system as if we would do an update. Jiri Srain and Lukas prototyped that system within yast during hackweek II and I spent all easter trying to get a working imaging solution. So that's what we use now in Alpha3+ - and saving roughly 50% installation time compared to 10.3 (http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3385). This is done by the package openSUSE-images. It takes 4 lists of packages (patterns enhanced_base, x11, gnome and kde for the very architecture) and installs them with zypper in a chroot. After that it splits out the meta data and the common parts and generates compressed tar files that end up on the DVD. Yast will see a description file on what pattern selection, what set of tar files to unpack and will do so. This takes a fraction of the time it would take with rpm, still after that you have a correctly installed system. The only difference noticed so far is the install time in rpm header (which is frozen at the time openSUSE-images built). So how does this affect you as packager? If your package is not in the default patterns: not at all. If it is, there are special rules your package has to follow not to break this optimization. Most importantly: %post scripts should not create host specific configurations that can't be updated later. This rule already applies as we provide live CDs, so no change. But important to remember. Other than that? I can't think of any, but the method is pretty new and I'm not sure it was tried before. If you have further questions, feel free to contact me. Greetings, Stephan --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-packaging+help@opensuse.org