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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?)
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