Open SUSE failure as well

After a series of failures with debian, ubuntu, gentoo and fedora to install over my old Gnu/Linux installation I give openSUSE a try. I have never tried this distribution before.

I download OpenSUSE 11.1 x86_64 DVD.
Boot up. Afer som time I get a blue screen saying file:/var/adm/mount/boot/x86_64/root: SHA1 sum wrong. If you really trust your repository, you may continue in an insecure mode.

Well I don't trust the bittorent download of Open-SUSE. But what is there to loose? I like living on the edge.

Then it says make sure CD1 is in your drive. Three times. But I have a DVD. The the installation fails. Nothing strange, I am used. Just try another time again.

It fails. It seems I now can select a network install. Now I just need an IP address. Sorry it was impossible to find, or didn't work. It was not http://download.opensuse.org/distributions/11.1/repos/oss/

I reboot, this time check the installation media first. Actually there was a problem in a sector. But I had the Mac verify the disc just recently when I wrote it.

Also for fun I try the firmware test. I find a memory hole, and some other things.

Reboot. Now I try to change to http instead of DVD as source. I select server download.opensuse.org and directory distributions/11.1/repos/oss/. Didn't work. I reboot and select http://download.opensuse.org and /distribution/11.1/repos/oss/
note the removed s in distribution. Didn't work. It seems it should be repo not repos. BTW how hard can it be to have this as a default?

And it didn't work with /distribution/11.1/repo/oss/ either. I am dropped into the text based installer. I try http based install once again. This time by pinging download.opensuse.org and putting in the real ip adress as numbers as the ip address of the server. It marches on!!!

It looks really good. Green and grey. Not Mac not Windows, just plain good looking.

I deselect use automatic configuration, select new installation.

The map to select location is even prettier than Fedoras. They focus on the important stuff.

I select Gnome as desktop for a change. They also have Xfce which I usually use.

Now they suggest to delete my partitions. Instead I choose Edit Partition Setup. I din't understand anything about my drives. I click back and "LVM based" before Edit Partion Setup. They have a button "Import mount points". And it finds an old /etc/fstab on /dev/vg1/root. Presumably leftovers from a failed Fedora install. My "real" old fstab was wiped out by Gentoo.

It takes some time to edit the paritions. It adds or picks up a volume group /dev/system I have not seen before. Anyway it seems it won't format any discs so here I go. yes, they warned me that the disk wasn't empty.

Now I am presented with a nice overview of the installation settings and can edit them again. This is the best I have seen for an OS installation.

Now the installer starts. I almost immediately get "initializing the target directory failed.". No information why it failed though. That is not user-friendly. I like the pretty map, but a little info here would have been even more appreciated.

Time to give up and go to bed. Now I have ran out of Gnu/Linux distributions to try I think.