Trying Out The OpenSUSE 13.2 Beta: The Installer Is Still Lacking

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Trying Out The OpenSUSE 13.2 Beta: The Installer Is Still Lacking

With today's openSUSE 13.2 Beta release I decided to give it a whirl on the Core i7 5960X test system to see how things go for this latest openSUSE update gearing up for its official debut in November...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTc5NDI

[Luke_Wolf]

While I haven't checked out the new 13.2 installer, I've got to disagree with you Michael. openSUSE has always had my favorite installer because it's simple yet powerful, if you don't want to customize things you can just keep hitting next because it has sane defaults, but if you do, their installer is pretty awesome, whereas Ubuntu and friends suck for anything more advanced then pointing it at a set of partitions.

[Guest]

While I haven't checked out the new 13.2 installer, I've got to disagree with you Michael. openSUSE has always had my favorite installer because it's simple yet powerful, if you don't want to customize things you can just keep hitting next because it has sane defaults, but if you do, their installer is pretty awesome, whereas Ubuntu and friends suck for anything more advanced then pointing it at a set of partitions.

I agree with this, although I speak from 13.1's installer experience. Last time I tried 13.2/Factory, the installer was broken when trying to do any kind of drive partitioning, but it seems they got that fixed.

[Armin]

Michael, I think you are doing something wrong there!

I just installed openSUSE 13.2 beta and the installer works fine for me. Even on a ThinkPad T500 from 2008 with a Intel Core 2 Duo CPU it's working really fast (OK, I guess the SSD helps with that a bit). I also recently installed openSUSE 13.1 on a new HP zBook with a Intel Core i7-4800QM QC, which also worked extremely well.

[Gps4l]

While I haven't checked out the new 13.2 installer, I've got to disagree with you Michael. openSUSE has always had my favorite installer because it's simple yet powerful, if you don't want to customize things you can just keep hitting next because it has sane defaults, but if you do, their installer is pretty awesome, whereas Ubuntu and friends suck for anything more advanced then pointing it at a set of partitions.

That remark confused me too.

Last time I installed 13.1, I extended my home partition, during the install.
And I like the suse installer better then the ubuntu one ( because it hides too much)

[cbamber85]

The last time I tried Anaconda (the latest official release) it couldn't see my RAID array... I'll stick with my slow openSUSE installer thanks.

[araxth]

Maybe i am missing something here but as far as i remember OpenSUSE distro has roughly 4 Gb of data to install whereas Ubuntu for instance provides 700 Mb images with optional downloading of every utility. In addition Open SUSE provides customized install as well, something i don't recall seeing at Ubuntu. And much more, therefore i feel that the comparison is quite silly not to say more. Fedora i never tried to be honest and i always install from DVD / images. I never tried USB Stick setup either.

[matszpk]

Ten month ago I was installing OpenSUSE on the VirtualBox (for testing software). I encountered some problems when VM had too few (512MB) memory (just installer couldn't go to next step). Maybe installer is slow, but also requires hundreds megabytes of the memory. I didn't try to run installer with 256mb option (currently, I don't know what is name of this to reduce memory requirements). Does other distro's installers also requires many hundreds megabytes?

[Cyber Killer]

The article is plain wrong, it just shows that Michael doesn't have much experience with this distro. OpenSUSE has the most awesome installer of all the distros that I tried (and that would be very many), not dumbed down for an idiot, but proper advanced settings can be configured at install time. You can add ldap login, iscsi targets, you can pick which packages to install or not install, ntp clock synchro, etc... All the needed stuff, the "home users" and other n00bs (that never really install their own OS anyway) do not concern me.

So IMO the installer might have some bugs (it's beta after all), but it's awesome as always. (and nobody sane uses the automatic partitioning settings anyway)

[Guest]

Maybe i am missing something here but as far as i remember OpenSUSE distro has roughly 4 Gb of data to install whereas Ubuntu for instance provides 700 Mb images with optional downloading of every utility. In addition Open SUSE provides customized install as well, something i don't recall seeing at Ubuntu. And much more, therefore i feel that the comparison is quite silly not to say more. Fedora i never tried to be honest and i always install from DVD / images. I never tried USB Stick setup either.

openSUSE by-default offers a DVD 4GB image which contains a good bit of included software, and a couple of desktop environments. It's ideal for if you know you want to install openSUSE, and/or want to customize what software gets installed.

openSUSE also offers LiveCD images for individual desktop environments and the default software set (I think it's further down their download page iirc; but I don't believe it's in plain sight either). Good for testing, and for installing it as-is. Ubuntu (and variants) as mentioned also do this.

As for USB stick setup, there's nothing really different vs optical media. You write the image to the flash drive, boot it, and run/install it. It's usually much faster, and is less suspecial to file transfer errors. Basically the only way I install operating systems anymore.

Ten month ago I was installing OpenSUSE on the VirtualBox (for testing software). I encountered some problems when VM had too few (512MB) memory (just installer couldn't go to next step). Maybe installer is slow, but also requires hundreds megabytes of the memory. I didn't try to run installer with 256mb option (currently, I don't know what is name of this to reduce memory requirements). Does other distro's installers also requires many hundreds megabytes?

Iirc, Ubuntu's ubiquity recommended like 768MB of RAM to run properly, but I think you can also get by with 512MB. Anything lower than that, and you'd be better off with their Alternate installer.

openSUSE include both a GUI installer (either from LiveCD or the smaller-footprint DVD installer), and a low-graphics installer (like Ubuntu's alternate installer).

(and nobody sane uses the automatic partitioning settings anyway)

I think I'm pretty sane I don't really require any specific partitioning setup (I install distros to an entire drive), but I do at the very least uncheck the separate Home partition box.