hey all, i've been stuck with RH 6.2 for too long now and never had time to finally switch to suse 7.0 professional, which has been waiting in the box unopened now for months. now, semester break, and i finally found time to do the upgrade - but it turns out to be a nightmare. i am a fairly experienced almost-expert linux user and can confidently say that i know what i am doing. however, i tried installing suse 7.0 now on three different systems, and everytime it failed due to stupid reasons. for the first two systems, i cannot vouch because they might be broken in themselves, so i am going to describe the nightmares i've been having with my production system: Dell Latitude CPi-A 366MHz Laptop 256Mb RAM 6.4 Gb Hdd 24x CD-ROM Neomagic 2.5Mb Video Neomagic Sound RH 6.2 installed like a jiffy, never any problems, everything works! but i hate RH, i want to use suse!!! okay, here's what i did: because i consider myself advanced, i started using YaST1. i set up the partition table as follows: /dev/hda1 /boot 8Mb ext2fs /dev/hda2 <swap> 256Mb /dev/hda3 extended /dev/hda4 266Mb suspend2disk (dell specific) /dev/hda5 / 500Mb reiserfs /dev/hda6 /usr 1500Mb reiserfs /dev/hda7 /usr/local 350Mb reiserfs /dev/hda8 /home 3000Mb reiserfs /dev/hda9 /var 100Mb reiserfs /dev/hda10 /tmp 200Mb reiserfs YaST1 reported an error trying to format the partitions because they "hadn't been configured" - but there was nothing left to configure in the partitioning manager. so i said - well, maybe i am dumb, let's use YaST2... i recreated the above partition table (actually i had /dev/hda5 at 150Mb, /dev/hda6 at 1200Mb, /dev/hda7 at 1000Mb, but YaST said it needed more for / and /usr, so i gave it more) (*1*) <footnotes below> then i went and selected "Default" for packages and still had to go through to disable a whole lot of crap like NIS, scanner stuff, cd burning and SCSI stuff, GNOME and KDE (i use wmaker) and and and. finally, the packages where all adjusted and the package management displayed something like 100Mb free on /usr and 50Mb free on /. so i said "great", and went to install. the first error message was "could not create swap partition on /dev/hda2". this is almost like windoze - a great error message but no details. i said "continue" and the RPM's started to be installed, except that the very first RPM gave an error "drive capacity exhausted" and i clicked continue just to get the same error for every subsequent package. after somehow disabling the error message for all the remaining packages (which all failed), YaST could not create and rc.config and other files and the installation failed and i rebooted, took my old harddrive and started up RH again to type this email. i am frustrated! SuSE being great and all, YaST2 isn't compatible with my expertise. could someone maybe shine some light into this affair? (the install was english, english keyboard layout, not that it matters...) thanks, martin --- footnotes - there's actually only one... --- (*1*) the final suggestion by YaST was 500 Mb for / with all the packages installed that i wanted. with separate /usr, /var, /tmp, and /boot partitions, why the *heck* does SuSE need 500Mb for / ??? my RH ran with 50Mb! [greetings from the heart of the sun]# echo madduck@!#:1:s@\@@@.net -- xerox does it again and again and again and ...