Hey guys,

I'm a little at a loss here...I tried to install 10.1 on my desktop machine (it's a P-3 650 with 524 megs of ram and a 20 gig drive). It refuses to start up the graphical installer, and wants to kick me into the old "text-ish" yast install. And says that it could be becasue it doesn't support the vid card or not enough ram.

Ok. I have enough ram. And the vid card is an Accel Grpahics AccelStar II permedia, that I've installed linux and bsd's on over and over, experiementing, without a single hitch.

This has been kind of a shocker. It's the first time that SUSE hasn't been able to fire off normally for me since back in my toshiba laptop 75mgz with 0ne gig of space and 40 mb ram. With that machine I used to have to do it the old fashioned way.

But this machine is much newer and tougher, and as I said, I've done probably a hundred different installs over the past year and a half or so on it.

Did Suse just change that much, or is there something simple that I'm missing? If it's a change, than all I can say is, I'm underwhelmed.. For years, I only used Suse because it had the best hardware recognition, the best graphical installer, the best package management and repos...with the latest release, I find myself missing the old SuSE...all of the new and exciting features aside, something seems to have taken a turn for the worse. Lots of eye candy, but just not what it used to be on the whole. I've installed it successfully on another machine (a much newer laptop), and so far, it feels really sluggish and bloated, and on I'm not impressed with the lack of drivers for my pcmcia subsystem and sd card reader (ubuntu DOES set them up right), and with it's networking support. But I wanted to give it another chance on my desktop machine...

Any thoughts would be appreciated...

Thanks so much,
Dan

I suggest the first thing you should try is to reduce the resolution. I don't know the sequence of buttons to press, but at the initial boot screen you should be able to choose a diferent resolution. Another option is to check the BIOS if it allows you to share more RAM for the video card (if it is a shared memory card). Next is to run the memory test. SUSE is quite sensitive to RAM errors.

SUSE 10.1 is broken. Chances are there's nothing wrong with your machine but just another bug in the code of many. If you want a strong and stable release you should revert back to 10.0.

I see more posts in multiple Linux forums about SuSe 10.1 install problems than any other distro or any other version of SuSe. Most of the time the solution involves passing different options to the command at the install prompt. I used to recommend SuSe to friends, but several have not been able to install 10.1 due to various system hangs and lock-ups during the install.

I finally moved completely over to Slackware and haven't looked back since. I don't want to badmouth SuSe, as it used to be my favorite distro, and I still have kind of a soft spot for it, but now that I've moved completely to Slack for workstations and Fedora for servers, I don't see myself going back to SuSe anytime soon. The huge speed improvement that Slack gives me on the same hardware is enough in itself.