I must admit, the installation of openSUSE 11 (RC1) is astonishing. I used a mini-ISO containing just the installer with its basic components and downloaded everything else from the (internal) installation repository. The whole process faciliates a graphical interface but you can fall back to a text based one, if you have an unsupported video adapter or neccessary.

The user interface is clear and simple but to me very appealing. I have seen the new design of the installer first at FOSDEM where the developers asked for feedback, whereby I would like to mention that nearly all ideas from the developer room in Brussels have been integrated to the current version.

After the welcome screen the installer asks the usual questions like language, keyboard layout, date, time and timezone. Then you can choose between GNOME, KDE 3.5 and KDE 4.0 and I really like the way SUSE does not give a recommendation to the user. In my opinion this solutions is the best way not to discriminate one of the big desktops.

After this choice openSUSE wants you to set-up the hard disk. Therefore the amazing partitioner suggests a new partition layout where YaST should propose a for more than 99% of all situations suitable solution. The partitioner supports LVM and Kernel-Raid and is really intuitive to use. To get LVM or RAID configured, you have to use in Ubuntu the ‘alternate desktop CD‘, which is not only text based but much complexer and for a newbie in my opinion absolutely unusable.

The next step is to configure the authentication or create a local user and set the root password. I found it quite impressive that binding to a NIS or LDAP server is extremely easy. If the it staff does their job well (as they to at SUSE) YAST takes all information from the received DHCP offer and you just have to tick a select box - even for auto mounting NFS exports. I have to admit that I dislike the possibility to login a user automagically. In my opinion this is a strange behaviour of Windows you should not copy, but probably many people are used as much to it, so that they put their habit over security. For security reasons this option should not be enabled by default.

After this all important questions are answered and YaST presents a helpful installation summary where you can change even more things like the software selection or the default run level. In case you messed it up you can reset everything to openSUSE’s defaults. The installation itself seems to me to be relatively fast. This may be due to the fact that it is based on so called base images which speed up the whole process by about 30 percent.

A well known Debian developer said that even a hen can install Debian, if you put enough corn on the enter button.Even if this rule also applies for openSUSE 11 (as for nearly every distribution), a newbie definitively would prefer the graphical installer from SUSE. If everything with openSUSE works as well as the installer I probably will just miss the .deb package format.

Find a full installation walktrough in the openSUSE wiki.