openSUSE 13.1 The openSUSE project is sponsored by Novell in a similar capacity to how Red Hat sponsors Fedora. Both are community projects that form the basis for each company's commercial Linux product. openSUSE's lineage goes back to the older SuSE distributions. I am not familiar with SuSE from a user's point of view, so this evaluation is very much a new user trying it out. a) I downloaded the 11.3 release tree from this location: rsync://mirrors.kernel.org/opensuse/distribution/11.3/repo/ The tree weighs in at 14G, but this is both i386 and x86_64. b) The kernel and initrd can be found at these paths: distribution/11.3/repo/oss/boot/i386/loader distribution/11.3/repo/oss/boot/x86_64/loader The kernel is named 'linux' and the initrd is named 'initrd'. I copied these to my tftpboot tree and add pxelinux entries. c) The installation environment booted and after detecting devices, asked me for CD number 1. Pressing OK did nothing. The installer was insisting on CD number 1. Choosing Back took me to the language and keymap selection screen and then a main installation screen (all in text mode). The installer didn't seem to know how to continue, so I assumed I was missing some boot parameters necessary for a network install. Google eventually led me to: http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:PXE_boot_installation Where I found the additional boot parameters I needed to get the net install to go. They are: vga=0x314 showopts \ install=http://tenon.honolulu.burdell.org/opensuse/distribution/11.3/repo/oss/ With these parameters in place, the installation process booted right up and took me in to a graphical installer. d) The first screen presents the license agreement and asks for the language and keymap. If I choose another language, the installer downloads and loads the translation data and the screen is updated immediately. The license agreement appears in English unless a translation is available. You can click License Translations and see they have the EULA in English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, and Traditional Chinese. Also of note is when you select a different language, it changes the keymap selection to what I assume is the typical keymap for that language. You can go and pick a different keymap and the language stays the same. The general installer screen layout shows the main steps of installation in the left third of the screen and the task at hand in the right two thirds of the screen. There is a Help button which offers a little explanation for the screen you are on. There is also an Abort button. I clicked Next to proceed. e) The next screen is System Probing. It scanned for a bunch of things and displayed some animation while it was doing that. Then it moved on to the Installation Mode. 'New Installation' was selected. I could also check Update. They have a check box for addon products on other media. Use Automatic Configuration is also checked. I clicked Next. f) The next screen is Clock and Time Zone. It was set to USA Eastern, so I changed it to USA Hawaii. Hardware clock set to UTC is checked. There is a Change... button where you can set the clock manually or enable NTP. The installer enabled NTP automatically and synchronized the clock, so I left that as is. I clicked Next. g) The installer then takes you to the Desktop Selection screen. You can choose GNOME Desktop, KDE Desktop, or Other. KDE is the default, but I changed that to GNOME and clicked Next. h) The Partitioning step comes next. It first offers a suggestion and shows the steps. There are two radio buttons labeled 'Partition Based' and 'LVM Based'. There are also two buttons. One is Create Partition Setup... which I assume takes you to manual partitioning. The other is Edit Partition Setup... which I assume does the same thing, but prefills the screen with the suggested partitioning scheme. What's interesting is Partition Based was selected by default rather than LVM Based. I changed it to LVM Based and then clicked Edit Partition Info. This took me to the Expert Partitioner screen. This looks like our storage filtering UI plus the edit partition screen we have. There are two columns with the left one showing a tree of devices and other info. The right column changes based on what you choose on the left. You can set up RAID here or add NFS mounts. Resizing is available and other per device settings can be changed. There is a Device Graph and Mount Graph summary screen as well as a text summary of what storage will look like. See screenshots for more information. The Partitioning setup screens in the openSUSE installer are verbose. It exposes many settings that a lot of users probably wouldn't care about. There are some things we might consider exposing through kickstart only. i) Next you are taken to the Create New User screen. User's Full Name, Username, Password, and so on. There is a checkbox asking if you want to use this password for system administrator. There is also a checkbox labeled 'Receive System Mail' and one for 'Automatic Login'. You can click Change and choose Local (/etc/passwd), LDAP, NIS, or Windows Domain for authentication. You can also check the password encryption type between DES, MD5, or Blowfish. Local and Blowfish are the default. To me this is another example of a screen that is most likely unnecessary. I created an account and used the same password for root. I unchecked Automatic Login. Click Next and it checks to make sure your password is strong. j) The next screen is the Installation Settings screen, which is another overly verbose screen detailing all of the answers you gave during the installation process and what will happen once it actually begins. There is a Change... button at the bottom and you can go and change any of the parts of installation. It never asked me about package selection aside from whether or not I wanted KDE or GNOME. If you Change the Software section on this screen, it takes you to a detailed task and package selection screen. You can even make it MORE complicated by clicking Details, in which case it expands to the entire screen and puts more widgets on the screen. I left the defaults and clicked Install. k) A dialog appears asking you to confirm installation. I clicked Install again. Installation begins and a progress bar appears. The Perform Installation screen (what you are now looking at) has two tabs. You can leave it on Slide Show and watch slides as the install progresses, or you can choose Details and watch something entirely different while it installs. Again, choices for the sake of choices. DISLIKES: Partitioning screen is too verbose. Too many options are exposed to users. The install tree is difficult to dive in to and find files. The "loader/" directory itself is like a garbage heap. Too many configuration choices throughout the installation. Picking the password encryption algorithm or selecting what method by which to mount disks is unnecessary and just adds to the complexity of the installer. Even the install progress screen lets you watch details or a slide show...why the choice there? The sidebar on the left takes up too much screen space and is not really useful. LIKES: Device Graph and Mount Graph along with the general presentation of the partitioning screen. The interface also took up the entire screen, something we desperately need to do in anaconda. Package selection was skipped by default, but I think that might be too simple. I think leaving a task selection in place is a good idea.