Hey all.

I've heard alot about OpenSUSE, about how it's more or less the best, most intergrated KDE OS around...

Now, I've always wanted to try it, BUT, I do have one problem.


I seem to be stupid.

Every time I use a LiveCD (either burnt myself or from a magazine) or a LiveUSB...something goes wrong. Horribly wrong.

I get a load of I/O errors, Kernaloops...and even if one LiveCD/USB avoids those, I end up with screen brightness set to zero.

Can someone please tell me if I'm doing something wrong?

I'm downloading the KDE iso from the website...using unetbootin or K3b depending on the medium...I THINK I'm doing something wrong!

Two quick questions:
- Did you check the md5sum and/or the sha1sum for the iso?
- Can you describe your hardware?

I'm aware of what the md5checksum is....I just have no idea how to perform it.

My hardware is an ASUS X50GL laptop, with a Nvidea card (requireing the use of closed-source drivers)

If you download the .iso and the MD5 to a folder and then point K3b at the .iso, it will recognise it as an .iso and work out the MD5 in front of your eyes. You can then check it before you proceed.

Sadly, the MD5 did not pass...but as my download speed is about 75kb/s I was not really willing to sit down for another few hours

I gave it a shot, and I acutally got in...I found YaST useful, but ultimately it was little things, like Plasma freezing every time I put in a new widget, that got me back to Kubuntu.

On a related note; how would you go about 'repairing' an .iso with an incorrect MD5?

Dante Ashton wrote:On a related note; how would you go about 'repairing' an .iso with an incorrect MD5?

You can't.
It is a bad idea to install a broken iso: you will end with a broken system.
Another way to check the md5sum is to download the text file with the code (1), put it in the same folder that contains the iso image, open a terminal and type
md5sum -c <text-file-with-md5sum-list>
c is for "compare"

(1) The file contains something like this:
<md5 code> file-name.iso

So the only method of 'repairing' is to re-download and cross your fingers, then?

Does downloading through torrents verifiy the file? are there any common download methods that do?

Both metalink and torrents are self-verifying. This means that as a chunk is downloaded ( usually about 2mb in size ) its checksum is checked to ensure it isn't corrupted.

ahhh, bcooksley! you come to the rescue again!


I did NOT know that; note to self: you have even more reason to seed now...