I used to quite like OpenSUSE. However, the other day I installed it 
about 13 seperate times. Let me tell you why.

I set up a virtual machine and start installing. It takes rather a long 
time to do this, by the way. Eventually the installation finishes, I go 
to long in... and discover that my password isn't recognised. If I log 
in as root it works, and then I discover that root is the only user 
account set up on the system. (Despite the installer asking me for a 
regular username and password.)

After repeating this song and dance a few times, I discover something. 
During the installation process, one of the text screens that flashes 
past too quickly for you to read it says (approximately) this:

*** Starting YaST...
src/module82/sub46/foo.c: malloc(1) failed. Aborting.

This in amoungst an entire screenful of other chatter, mind you.

So I try again for the 7th time, and this time I give the VM 1GB of RAM 
instead of just 0.5GB. At the point where this text screen flashes past, 
I now get YaST show up and tell me it's "saving user settings". And it 
spends about 3 minutes doing it. AND, when the installation is finally 
finished, I can actually log in, and everything works.

To sumarise, if you have less than 1GB of RAM, part of the installation 
process silently dies, and the rest of the installer script carries on 
anyway. There *is* an error message, but it flashes past far too fast to 
see unless you're really watching like a hawk. (And how many non-geeks 
would know that "malloc(1) failed" indicates a memory problem??)

Did somebody fail basic software engineering? Hello? Graceful failure? 
If your product doesn't support computers with less than 1GB of RAM then 
fine, fair enough. But you should at least STATE THIS, rather than just 
silently continue even though part of the installation has 
catastrophically failed. If this was a physical machine, I could have 
wasted hours checking the CD burned correctly, testing my CD drive, 
running memory checks, and so on.

How difficult would it be to detect, right at the beginning of the 
installation, that the PC has only 0.5GB of RAM, and only offer 
installation options which will ACTUALLY WORK WITH THIS CONFIGURATION??

(Better yet, I can't actually see anything anywhere on the OpenSUSE 
website which actually states what the minimum spec is supposed to be in 
the first place. I'm guessing if I select text-mode install, the minimum 
spec decreases dramatically...)

Additionally: Maybe I'm just going soft in my old age. But does anybody 
else here remember a time when the most touted advantage of Linux was 
"it's much less of a resource hog than Windows"? I realise that RAM is 
cheap these days, but a distro that won't even install unless you have 
ONE GIGABYTE of RAM?? What the hell does the installer need a gig for?!

The above was using KDE. It turns out that installation fails in the 
exact same way if you select GNOME instead. RAM may be cheap, but my PC 
only has a finite amount of it, so I can't just hand it out to random 
VMs like it's candy. Ubuntu works just fine with 0.5GB. Debian works 
just fine with 0.5GB. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've installed both of 
them with as little as 300MB of RAM. Hell, KNOPPIX contains everything 
*including* the kitchen sink, and it only demands 128MB to work. 
(Although obviously not very well.) But an installer that won't even 
bother getting out of bed for less than 1024MB? Um, why??

(Again, I imagine if I ask for a minimal text-mode system rather than an 
all-singing KDE setup, it probably works with a lot less. But even so... 
why?)

Post a reply to this message