On Fri, 25 Oct 2002, Kevin Jackey wrote:

tried my best to verify that the server I was loading from (mirror.mcs.anl.gov) had mirrored 8.1, and it appeared to have done so. Re-transferred and burned the boot.iso cd, then ran the starttup and pointed it to /pub/suse/i386/8.1 (also tried /current). Still got the same effect where it puills up the installation program, I choose my settings, it scans for packages, then displays the "No base selection available" and "ERROR:No proposal" messages under the "SOFTWARE" selection item. Any ideas what I am doing wrong? Could someone that it worked for post their steps, and any ideas I might be able to follow? This is very frustrating!

I had a similar experience trying to install SuSE 8.1 on a new laptop with a DVD drive. Subsequent experience convinced me that the drive was flaky. Also I had a similar error message on an enterprise mirror with a wrong directory structure; when I fixed the directories (i.e. made the desired files appear), net installation worked perfectly. If the machine can locate /pub/suse/i386/8.1/boot/root (the installer's initrd -- filename is from memory, could have forgotten a directory) then the initial part of installation will go fine, up to software selection. Try this: "md5sum /dev/hdc /tmp/iso-image" . (referring to the file that you burned onto the CD, and to be repeated for each disc.) If the image was damaged during burning, all kinds of now and future problems can be caused by that. I hope the data is not transformed during burning, e.g. by adding track headers. If anyone with more experience can confirm or correct this procedure, please speak up. If you're associated with Argonne, and/or if their mirror is not too ridiculously loaded, you might consider a network install, rather than downloading ISO images. James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Email: jimc@math.ucla.edu http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc (q.v. for PGP key)