Hi all,

I'm a newbie and trying to install SUSE 10.2 on my laptop (currently running Knoppix). However, it freezes at the partition section (only the text mode install will even go this far).
SUSE is my first choice, but as it didn't work, I decided to try Ubuntu 6.10. The install started fine, but after a few minutes it also freezed (with a blank screen so I don't even know how far it got). Tried that a few times, then switched to Kubuntu. Same story.
Please help!

Acer laptop
Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz
128MB Ram

Thanks.

I've faced the same problem, or rather the same symptoms (not sure if the problem is same). Steps I followed with Ubuntu:

- after downloading the image, see if the checksum matches -- if it does not, your image is faulty. After burning the image, when the disc boots, run the test to see if the cd is ok and does not have any defects.
- at the desktop disc boot prompt set correct language and country, choose "safe graphics mode", set resolution to something that works for sure (i.e. 800x600x16) and lastly press the button to edit the boot line and switch splash --> nosplash --this prevents graphical bootup and you should see what's going on. When I installed Ubuntu at a problematic pc it gave me all kinds of errors, freezes and odd stuff and in the end it seemed to be the graphics -- after booting the setup with "minimal" graphical settings everything worked nicely
- sometimes it's also good to try and pass extra options to the kernel, like acpi=off, some people have said it helps with some problems. I myself didn't need that, but with the problematic pc I used that the first time (after several tries I started trying very unprobable stuff); the second time I figured out it wasn't really needed.

If the text mode won't work even, you might have something odd going on. I'm pretty sure you can press CTRL+ALT+F? (F1 or F2 maybe?) during the setup to get a terminal which prints status/error/warning messages; see if they would help.

The problem is most likely the 128mb of ram on that laptop. Try the alternate install cd download for ubuntu. Here is a link to find the right iso image for Kubuntu, my favorite distro. Well....with only 128mb of ram maybe a KDE based distro isn't such a hot plan. It would not be snappy. Have you heard of elive ? It is debian based, and does run well on older hardware. I used it for a while myself, and liked it.

http://www.elivecd.org/

They have nice eye candy for such a lightweight distro too. Have fun. Check out DSL too, stands for damn small linux. It's a 50mb download, and you can install it to hard drive too. It's a live cd, so you can test it first.

Hope this helps a bit.

David

I'll try the safe graphics mode and if all else fails I'll look into Elive.

Good suggestions, thanks.

I'd go with the first suggestion from bOuncer. I tried to get ubuntu and kubuntu to install and they both stopped at different points during the install. NO error messages, just stopped installing. Tried burning from both the torrent downloads and dialup (?) too. Same thing happened with both images. To make it a short story I tried burning the image again at 16x (vs 40x) and the install went just fine the very first try.

try to install Gentoo 2006.1!

Thanks guys! I eventually managed to install Elive and it's working fine. I think it might have had something to do with the write speed I used, because I choose 4x on the Elive burn and it installed the first time.

I appreciate all your help. Thanks again!