niek.be

Evolution?

I consider myself a more than average person when it comes to knowledge of IT in general. I’m not afraid of attacking a computer case with a screwdriver, or flashing weird ROMs on my cellphone, or… dual booting a Linux distro. I’ve used Linux before, liked it (couldn’t miss Windows though), messed it up, forgot about it. Now I want to try it again……and it already goes wrong during installation. To prepare the installation, I used the live cd of GParted to make some unassigned space at the end of my hard drive (about 40 GB). Next I downloaded the OpenSuse 11.2 KDE live cd. After rebooting I chose ‘Installation’ and let the installer layout some partitions: root (Ext4, 15 GB), swap (2 GB) and /home (24 GB). The installation goes well until it reaches 80% and then I get “Copying the live image to hard disk failed”.

Google brings up some links, this one being the best: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=549158. Someone suggest this:

crutches for 11.2 release installation:

1. boot into live system (kde or gnome);
2. run terminal emulator;
3. type “su -”;
4. cd /usr/share/YaST2/modules;
5. open ImageInstallation.ycp in editor (vim ImageInstallation.ycp);
6. go to line 910;
7. add “–hard-dereference” into tar options;
8. ycpc -c ImageInstallation.ycp;
9. run installation;
10. …
11. PROFIT

So I do exactly that: choose boot instead of installation, edit the ImageInstallation.ycp file (had to Google how to edit and save it: INSERT, then edit, then ESC and : wq to save and quit), recompile YaST with that script and choose Live Installer. It starts but it still ends at 80%. Someone else suggested to make the root at least 10 GB big, but mine is way bigger!

You know what the biggest issue is? This bug is known since 22/10/2009 and today I can still download images with that bug!!! How’s that for user-friendly? Windows maybe the Devil, but at least it works! And that’s exactly why Linux will never defeat Windows.

Yes, there are a lot more distro’s and I have tried some of them, but all just had a very buggy feeling from the beginning. You might think that almost 20 years of development (I’m talking about the Linux kernel) would render at least an easy to install product…

I’m off to the OpenSuse forums to ask for help.