My experience has been that if you are missing some system
dependencies, the first expect session will always fail, whether
running as root or not. This may be unique to the openSuSe
distributions, but I don't think so. It is more likely just an issue
exposed by the fact that the openSuSe installations have less of the
system dependencies installed out of the box. Maybe the SuSe
distributions are the best way to test the installer :)?
In general I do test on SuSE 9.3, 10.0 and 10.1, and the installer
does work on those platforms.
As for the dependency installation failing: I have seen failures due
to several causes:
* Users running as root. The expect session wants to see "assword:"
when it tries to log in as root. If the user is already root, then
the computer doesn't ask for a password. Therefore, the expect
session just hangs, waiting for the "Password:" which never comes.
Solution: Don't install as root.
* Non-english users. This one was interesting. A German user had
the expect session hang immediately after he started the dependency
install. The reason was that his box asked for his password as
"Passwort:", the German word. The expect session was waiting for
"Password:". Therefore, it hung, waiting forever. I haven't done
anything to fix this yet. The fix will be for the install wizard to
set the local environment to English only upon startup. I haven't
implemented this yet because I am not sure what kinds of problems that
might cause (what happens if no English translations are installed?)
* The WTF catagory. In this catagory are some occasional,
intermittant failures I see in my testing. I don't know exactly what
causes them, but I suspect timing issues withing the call/response
process of the expect session. With the last CD I upgraded the expect
package, so I'm hoping this problem will just go away. But I haven't
thoroughly verified that yet, either by verifying the design, or by
rigorous testing.