YaST Installer Steps

yast-installer-steps.md

YaST Installer Steps

See also the simple standard installation screenshots (openSUSE Tumbleweed installation).

First (Simple) Hardware Probing

Detect

• system architecture
• graphics card to select graphical or text-based installation
• network cards

Network Probing

Automatically detect an available network connection (cable Ethernet, WiFi) and try to connect with DHCP.

Installer Self-Update

Language Selection

Select the language to be used during installation and later in the installed system.

License Agreement

Product Registration

(SLE-based products)

Let the user enter a product registration code and contact the SUSE registration server to activate one of the customer's subscriptions / product purchases and add online repositories for those products.

Product Selection

(if configured by the product(s) on the installation media; mostly for SLE-based products, not so much for openSUSE)

Select a base product and (if available) one or several add-on products

(s/390 only) DASD Handling

• Activate DASDs (IBM s/390 mainframe (virtual) disks)
• Format DASDs

Storage Probing

Detect

• Hard disks
• USB storage
• RAIDs
• Multipath (and if detected, ask if it should be started)
• LVM
• Btrfs (including multi-volume and RAID Btrfs)
• Network storage:
  • iSCSI
  • FCoE

Enable Online Repos

System Role Selection

Select one of (configurable per product)

• Desktop with KDE Plasma
• Desktop with GNOME
• Desktop with Xfce
• Generic desktop
• Server (text-only, no graphical desktop)
• Transactional server

Storage Proposal

• Propose a storage setup as configured in the product's control.xml file
• The user can override that storage proposal
• Allow guided storage setup to change storage proposal parameters
• Fully manual partitioning

Storage Technologies

• Simple partitions

• LVM

• LUKS

• Btrfs

  • Single-volume Btrfs (one partition or one LVM logical volume)
  • Multi-volume Btrfs
  • RAID with Btrfs
  • Btrfs subvolumes
  • Btrfs snapshots (in cooperation with snapper)

• RAID

  • RAID 0 (Striping)
  • RAID 1 (Mirroring)
  • RAID 5/6

• BCache

• Multipath

• iSCSI

• FCoE

• DASD (s/390)

Time Zone Selection

Creating a First User Account

• Detect existing Linux systems on the disk(s) and offer to import user accounts from there

• Create a new user account

• Enable or disable auto-login for that first user account

Setting the Root Password

Installation Proposal

• Bootloader configuration

• Software selection

  • Patterns selection
  • Fine-grained package selection
  • Dependency check
  • Dependency problem resolution

• Default systemd target

• Security settings

  • Configure CPU mitigations
  • Enable or disable firewall
  • Enable or disable sshd
  • Open or close ssh port

• KDump

Perform Installation

• Create partitions, filesystems etc. (or more generally apply the selected storage setup)

• If configured (default with Btrfs on a large enough volume), prepare support for Btrfs snapshots in cooperation with snapper and snapper's installation_helper

• Install packages; prefer latest updated versions from available online media if configured (so no outdated versions with possible vulnerabilities are installed first that might leave a time window for exploiting a security problem)

Finish Installation

• Apply the pending configuration
• Save install logs etc. to the newly installed system

Firstboot Hook

(if configured by the product)

This is where products on top of a base distribution (openSUSE Leap / Tumbleweed; SLES) can put a configuration workflow for their add-on part. Filesystems are already created, software is already installed.

If a product needs to set up and initialize a database or collect configuration data for their subsystems, this can be done here.