Installing opensuse 10.1 from the network.

I had a frustrating hour today, I wanted to install suse on this spare machine here so I can test the KOffice packages on that, and other distros. I choose the small image that downloads everything during the install; which is what I always do for installing Debian. (not that I install that more then ones per machine, but still, familiarity gets you points : ).

So, a 36Mb download later I burn it to CD and boot from that. I follow the instructions on the webpage that tell me I have to enter the http address in the boot screen. Seems a bit weird that thats not hardcoded, but ok.

This resulted in me getting dumped into the text-yast without any error message and I reboot to try again, maybe I made a typo. Did that a couple of times, you get my drift.. After some reboots-retries I finally find the logs creen behind alt-F3 and read that the download of this image failed due to an error; http code: 302.

Hang on; thats not an error! Thats a normal way of the server telling the download software that it wants you to use a different url. Apparently that 36Mb image does not contain a proper piece of http download software. :(

On my different machine I figure out the redirected URL and try again; success. The correct URL is; http://ftp.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/SL-10.1/inst-source/ Well, its downloading one 70Mb file now before I can start my installation. Not sure why that didn't go on the CD. Well, it makes at least me wish I bought the CDs...