Bugzilla – Bug 106021
opensuse does not offer easy to use 'install over network' option
Last modified: 2005-08-22 06:43:06 UTC
OpenSuse is very impressive. However the primary feature required of a program intended for 'non-technical' users is that it be easy to install. OpenSuse currently requires the downloading and burning of no less than Five CDs. This is beyond the patience of most non-technical users. Furthermore it is unnecessary and wastes the bandwidth of users and of the mirror organizations. This is particularly evident when realizing that the 4th and 5th CDs are only used for a few dozen megabytes worth of data, when the download of these two CDs alone takes over 1GB. On top of the problem of sheer size of download, there is the problem of incompleteness. I was hoping to port some wxpython programs from windows to linux. However, there appears to be no wxpython packages at all in the default CD-only installation of OpenSuse. Only by changing my installation source to an ftp mirror of SuSE was I able to find the appropriate wxpython packages. Aside from the fact that I can't figure out why the ftp site has different packages than the 2.4 GB of CDs I just downloaded, it was only a stroke of luck at google that let me know I could change my installation source in the first place. A better alternative is to have a single OpenSuse installation CD that, by default, uses an 'install from network' feature to download the rest of the system from the internet. Even better would be adding a p2p bittorrent type of feature on top of this. Everyone would save bandwidth this way. This change alone would increase usage of OpenSuse a lot because the biggest problem for non-technical users of computers is getting things installed in the first place. Thank you.
we do offer this, use the "inst-source" directory. You can find a minimal boot image in boot/boot.iso there.