Having failed to complete installation for the third, fourth, fifth (honestly, I've lost count) time, I snapped and went into #suse on Freenode. The SNR is #suse is reasonably tolerable - not as good as #freenode-social, not as bad as #ubuntu - so I went off to play games for a while with the thought of reading the scrollback to see if anything interesting had happened.
So about an hour later, I read through everything that's been happening, and I see all this stuff about using smart instead of YaST and comments that "package management is horribly broken". And then I see that the in-channel bot's advice on 10.1 is the following:
For information regarding the issues most users experience with SuSE 10.1 and how you can fix them, Please read the conversation posted here: http://spinink.net/conversation-with-new-suse-user/
The summary is quite bleak:
Novell has done what may be irreparable damage to SuSE Linux by releasing 10.1 WAY before it was ready for public consumption. I understand the need to get 10.1 out so that they could work out issues with the new package management libraries before the release of SLED 10, but this does not excuse their actions. Novell was extremely slow to respond to these issues after the 10.1 release. In fact, I would argue that they were completely ignoring the giant pink elephant in the room. The motto for 10.1 should be 'Novell SuSE Linux 10.1, We Bring You In With XGL and Send You Packing with Our Package Management.'In their defence, SUSE people like Marcus have replied to the effect of "well, we either release it with bugs, or don't release it at all". OK, I've studied project management. I understand where he's coming from. The problem is fixable, and openSUSE 10.2 will come out in December. Still sucks though...
Anyway, I think I might have solved the installation problem: not enough RAM. The install should work if I enable /swap during installation; if it doesn't, I'll install Kubuntu...
(Thanks to aka_druid and sPiN for identifying that and suggesting the fix, and thanks to sPiN for the article; now all I need to do is file the relevant bug against YaST to "enable swap during install if present" bang my head against a brick wall...)
Edit: Turns out swap was enabled. Maybe I just need more of it. Oh well, I'll get myself a Kubunutu ISO...