I tried to install the most recent OpenSuSE image I received when I attended the OpenSuSE Conference. We were given pendrives with a live image so I was interested how smooth the OpenSuSE installation was, compared to installing Fedora. The test machine is a three to four year old Intel Ideapad s10-3t, which I received from Intel a while ago. It’s certainly not the most powerful machine, but it’s got some dual core CPU, a gigabyte of RAM, and a widescreen touch display.
The initial boot took a while. Apparently it changed something on the pendrive itself to expand to its full size, or so. The installation was a bit painful and, at the end of the day, not successful. The first error I received was about my username being wrong. It told me that I must only contain letters, digits, and other things. It did not tell me what was actually wrong; and I doubt it could, because my username was very legit. I clicked away the dialogue and tried again. Then it worked…
When I was asked about my partitioning scheme I was moderately confused. The window didn’t present any “next” button. I clicked the three only available buttons to no avail until it occurred to me that the machine has a wide screen so the vertical space was not sufficient to display everything. And yeah, after moving the window up, I could proceed.
While I was positively surprised to see that it offered full disk encryption, I wasn’t too impressed with the buttons. They were very tiny on the bottom of the screen, barely clickable.
Anyway, I found my way to proceed, but when attempting to install, YaST received “system error code -1014” and failed to partition the disk. The disk could be at fault, but I have reasons to believe it was not the disks fault:
Apparently something ate all the memory so that I couldn’t even start a terminal. I guess GNOME’s system requirements are higher than I expected.