there's a trick to it

Jesse Smith's review of openSUSE 12.3 in this week's DistroWatch Weekly mentioned some installation difficulties that he encountered. In the DW comments section, "Andy Prough" posted the following:


One trick to installing openSUSE is to always try to download and install from the full DVD if possible. This distro doesn't seem to do near as well as Ubuntu and Mint at shoving everything you need into a smaller Live CD/DVD version. I've recommended that they stop producing the Live CD/DVD's if they aren't going to be able to control the quality of installation, or that they at least post a strong warning to avoid installing from that media. I think this may have contributed to the installation problems Jesse ran into as well.

If you go to the openSUSE forums, you'll find that most of the long-time users refuse to install from the live media or the Net install - they only use the full DVD. Although it takes longer to download, you get the added advantage of having a full repair disk plus an emergency off-line repository with thousands of software packages.

That's probably a good point; for my opensSUSE installations (12.1, 12.2, and 12.3 -- on a couple of different computers), I've used the KDE live disk each time. While I've managed to get each release installed, and each installation seemed easier than the previous one, my impression has been that openSUSE isn't the easiest distro to install. However, I figured that any difficulties I've had were the result of my not being familiar with the distro combined with the fact that I was adding them to my multi-boot set-ups.

Next time around, I may just do what was mentioned above -- go with the full DVD.