Boots the system on the hard disk (the system normally booted when the machine is started). This option is preselected.

The normal installation mode. All modern hardware functions are enabled.

If the normal installation fails, this may be due to the system hardware not supporting ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface). If this seems to be the case, use this option to install without ACPI support.

Boots the system with the DMA mode (for CD-ROM drives) and any interfering power management functions disabled. Experts can also use the command line to enter or change kernel parameters.

By default, drivers are loaded automatically during the installation. If this appears to cause problems, use this option to load drivers manually. However, this does not work if you use a USB keyboard on your machine.

If you are unable to boot into your installed Linux system for some reason, you can boot the computer from the DVD or CD1 and select this item. This starts a rescue system — a minimal Linux system without a graphical user interface, which allows experts to access disk partitions for troubleshooting and repairing an installed system. Less experienced users can alternatively use the system repair tool supplied with YaST. Refer to Chapter 6. System Repair for details.

This tests your system RAM by means of repeated read and write cycles. This is done in an endless loop, because memory corruption often shows up very sporadically and many read and write cycles might be necessary to detect it. If you suspect that your RAM might be defective, start this test and let it run for several hours. If no errors are detected after a longer time period, you can assume that the memory is intact. Terminate the test by rebooting.

Access context-sensitive help — help for the currently active screen element of the boot screen.

Select different graphical display modes for the installation. Also included is an entry to select the text mode, which is useful if the installation in graphical mode causes problems for some reason.

Choose among different installation media. Normally, install from the inserted installation disk, but in some cases you may want to select another source, such as FTP or NFS. The SLP (service location protocol) entry allows you to access an SLP server in the network, which in turn gives access to a selection of installation media as made available by that server. Details of the SLP protocol are discussed in Section 21.6. “SLP Services in the Network”.

Select the display language for the installation.

By default, diagnostic messages of the Linux kernel are not displayed during system start-up. You only see a progress bar. To display these messages, select ‘Native’. For a maximum of information, select ‘Verbose’.

Allows you to tell the system that you have an optional disk with a driver update for SUSE LINUX. You will be asked to insert the update disk at the appropriate point in the installation process.