Installing Linux Suse 10.1

Whilst it may have taken two days to finally get sorted, the installation process was relatively painless. The main delay was that my first effort at suse 10.1 install hung whilst "initialising catalogues", not knowing if it had hung or not at the time i left it overnight.

I'm not completely sure but i think this was to do with the mirror I chose to install from. I originally opted for the Kent UK mirror then after this hung, I chose the German mirror which worked fine, in fact the stage i left for 18 hours overnight only took about 3 minutes this time around!

The only thing to look out for is where they provide the mirror url's during the install, you actually need the IP of the mirror and then the path during setup. Why they don't just give you the details and save a lot of IP resolving and folder path copying I dont know.

I opted to do an online install to save me some CD burning time. Basically this involved downloading a boot disk ISO image from opensuse.org and burning it to CD (as a windows user with no fancy CD burning software I had to download and install ISO Recorder). Basically all that was needed was to pop in the CD and reboot my PC et voila! Linux install options ahoy.

A very thorough tutorial for performing an online install of Suse is available at opensuse.us.