Thanks to all who replied... I was originally attempting to do an FTP installation using the boot.iso. I have the computer hooked up to a LAN network residing behind a choke firewall which in turn is behind a standard NAT firewall. No Proxies, local DHCP, DNS, etc. Sven Burmeister wrote:
Tom Allison wrote:
I was testing the boot.iso installation yesterday and was unable to make any headway. Their is a failure at the Floppy IO, during the YAST configuration where it is checking packages.
As far as I am concerned there is no way that Yast is trying to install Suse from Floppy, which gives me to think if you are really writing about your experience, or just marketing some other OS.
Yast isn't trying to install from the floppy. I never said that it was. What is happening is that YAST goes through the installation process and dies during package selection, after the hardware detection process has finished. I'm not sure exactly where, but shortly after it determines a disk partition. The screen states package selection. The error is centered around an IO error regarding the floppy device.
Please fix this.
This shows that you do not have that much experience with computers and software, otherwise you would not ask for this in a mailinglist and without giving anymore details.
I will resist the temptation to flame you here. Seven years on Linux and 25 years with computers might make me somewhat qualified to have at least a rudimentary level of experience with computers. Your opinion on this point is not appreciated, but summary statements on my part can lead to this type of conclusion.
I am currently installation Suse from a friends Personal Edition. At least this way I will be able to see what Suse looks like.
However, it's a pretty grim start for what is proclaimed to be one of the better distributions out there. What surprises me most is that this boxen has been used to install everything as a test bed and it is here that it just can't get started.
The CD installation is extremely unstable on the XWindow GUI. I'm not sure that I will even be able to finish, but time will tell.
I cannot confirm any of this, in fact I think that it is very unlikely that this is related to the installation GUI if it happened at all, as there are so many users who installed Suse 8.2 without any problems, leaving aside some that had problems due to hardware failure but certainly not with a floppy drive that is not needed when Yast2 is up, especially if you are using the boot.iso, which would hint to a ftp-installation, or hd-installation (unlikely) but certainly not a floppy-disk installation. Further an I/O error with the fd might lead to Yast2 not including it into the configuration. However, if you used it for the boot-images successfully it sounds unlikely that it suddenly fails after that. If you used the CD boot.iso you would have disabled it in the BIOS. Knowing about testbed etc. shows some knowledge of computers, which strucks me because of your fix comment and the inability to give more detail, apart from trying to install 8.2 without fd, i.e. disabling it.
The instability with X has to do with the screen. This is a seperate error from my original problem with IO. If I wiggle the mouse when the hourglass is up, the display will break up into bars of green gibberish. Selecting a different mouse driver doesn't help this problem at all. I've simply learned not to move the mouse after a click. I call that unstable. I have an i810 integrated video chip on this motherboard. This may very well be a problem with the mouse, unfortunately the selection made my Yast is the most stable, but the best selection for the given mouse does not appear on the installation menu. And the Knowledge Base states: Cause: The floppy in your BIOS is deactivated. The kernel fails when it tries to recognize the hard disk partitions as there's no floppy device available. Solution: Please activate the floppy in your BIOS settings, even if there's no existing physical device. I couldn't find anything else out there per your previous suggestions.
I have not tried RedHat on this boxen yet, but I have tried Slackware, Gentoo, Debian with success.
In my opinion and I might be wrong this posting is meant to market some other OS, or just very ignorant of the computer knowledge shown in some parts of it. Whoever just installs Redhat, Slackware, Gentoo and Debian surely must have some knowledge in order not to fail at a floppy-problem without giving more information or trying disabling it.
This is not an attempt to market another OS. In fact I'm trying another OS to see how Suse compares with Gentoo, Debian, and Slackware. I've been MSFT free for 6 years.