I got some good and bad news from the openSUSE 'factory':

- the good news is, that both the Pegasos and EFIKA can be now installed without any hardware tweaking boot parameters:

- pata_via is now fixed, and both primary and secondary IDE channels work

- EFIKA hardware support is now fully modularized and all parts are now automagically found, without extra boot parameters, configuration file hacking, etc.

- and now the bad news: package management is completely broken from both point of views:

- there are many broken dependencies and unnecessary conflicts making installation difficult, and for many packages, including my favorite xfce, impossible

- it still has HUGE ram requirement, making it deadly slow on the EFIKA, but even on Pegasos

Summary: if someone has a lot of time, and courage, then go ahead, and help to make openSUSE on Genesi hardware better. Other way, if somebody is just curious about the latest developments, I would recommend to test beta2 (due end of this week). That will arrive on DVD, not as an almost 20GB ftp directory tree, meaning a fraction of the available packages, but also a lot less RAM & CPU requirement.

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

I definitely think we need a suitable way of 'hosting' the images off a USB key for the Efika, just so the memory requirement is somewhat reduced.

Network installs are the only really reasonable way of booting most Linux distributions but with 128MB RAM there is very little space to download most of these huge installer suites to a tmpfs or ramfs.

I wonder if anyone can test this on a PC or so to see if it works.. boot from a USB key or a floppy disk set or a PXE boot, and then mount installation images from ISO files on a USB stick?

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Matt Sealey

Strange. I know, that using ISO images for installation was a feature of the openSUSE installer. Now I can't find a trace of it, not even on x86... I'll check, how one could create a stripped down installation source.

BTW: today's factory release fixed most dependency problems in theory, but in practice it can't be installed...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/

Installing from a HDD partition seems to be completely broken now on openSUSE, and using ISO images is just a sub-feature of it. Filing a report in bugzilla...

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CzP
http://czanik.blogs.balabit.com/