Suse install problems - Don't give up!
From recent experience, all the openSuse 11.1 media has the same menu, thought some of the F key options are different between the CD/DVD and network versions.
All menus have "Check Installation Media". This can be slow, but is well worth doing before you start.
If this is a hardware problem, then there are two ways to tackle it.
1 - On the first menu hit F5, and select safe settings. This will use a set of generic drivers for video, etc which I find work with anything, including some very old hardware.
or 2 - hit ESC and you will get a message box "Your are leaving the graphical menu .....". Hit OK and the installer will drop to a basic DOS type menu which uses minimal graphics, and a very basic VESA driver.
So far I have been able to install Suse 10.3 or 11.1 on everything I have tried, from a very old 800Mhz Pentium 2 with 256Mb RAM & NVidia TNT 2 on-board graphics - very slow with 11.1, but usable with 10.3, to a slightly used Dell Precision 670 with 2x 3.4GHz Xeon (64bit), 4Gb RAM, NVidia Quadro NVS 280 graphics - very fast with 11.1 & KDE 3.5.10.
I always check new media before I try it, and sometime it takes 2 or 3 attempts, but so far no real failures, though with the Dell Precision, after trying KDE 4.1 for a day, I did a clean re-install with KDE 3.5. KDE 4.1 is not ready. It has lots of nice stuff, but the admin tools are not yet there, and it has too many bugs for productiot use.
Finally, an important tip, which I will try and get into the Wiki. On the menu where you choose "New instalation, or Update" untick the box marked "Use Automatic configuration". Thsi make the install take longer, and you will have to intervene in the final stages, but it will make sure it gets all the interface and peripheral settings correct. For example it always gets my big graphics monitor wrong, so the first boot is at 1024 x 768 when I chose 1600 x 1200.
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