Speedup the installation process

[dbpatankar]

Just a few days before I installed Mageia 2 and found that installation takes lot of time. For my case it took almost 4 hr to complete the installation. And hardware used is a desktop with 4GiB RAM, intel core 2 duo processor and about 50 GiB partition for Mageia. With this config I have installed many distros and no distro took more than about an hour.

Can there be any issue with the desktop hardware which has surfaced only during Mageia?

If not and if this time for installation is common for all then I think community should seriously think about it.

I also found that it takes a bit more time to install any package. And the behaviour is quiet unexpected. I see that it doesnt download all the packages at once. But download and install switch in between.

This is my first experience with Mageia and I may be completely wrong in some cases. However I would like to have your comments on these issues.

[doktor5000]

Well, for me a complete DVD install usually takes like 30-40 mins. but that is only limited by the speed of the dvd drive, as it's not the best and not the fastest.
Another more positive example, a dualarch cd install to my new SSD took 5 mins. overall. More than an hour is quite strange.
But you could workaround that by writing the installation medium to a usb stick, for example.

Or by any chance, are you talking about a netinstall? As you didn't say anything about which medium you used to install and what package selection you took.
Please provide more details.

[dbpatankar]

Ohh somehow I missed to mention the media used. It was not net install.

I used 64 bit LiveCD (Afrika, India) KDE for installation. Moreover netinstall is not possible by default since the system is in my institute and behind a proxy. So to use netinstall I have to first set up the connection settings. So even if it tries to connect to network it wont be able to do so.

I feel this should not be an issue with netinstall. I have noticed the same time lag during partitioning phase too.

Please let me know if you need any further information about the situation. I have used Mandriva once about 2 year before and I found it to be very good(and this was on my old laptop with very humble config).

[doktor5000]

I have noticed the same time lag during partitioning phase too.

What partitioning options did you use, did you maybe check for bad blocks or something like that (this may take a long time) please provide some more details about the installation you did.

[dbpatankar]

No, I didnt check the 'Check for bad block' radio button.

The / installation is on /dev/sda5 and one separate swap partition (which is same for fedora). The partition size is about 50 GiB. There are only 2 partitions used by Mageia viz /dev/sda5 for / and other one for swap (at the end of the disk). No separate /boot or /home partition.

I dont think I did any other specific change in the default installation process.

[doktor5000]

That would sound like a problem with the kernel driver which is used by Mageia to access the storage controller in your box or defective hardware.

You don't think you did any changes? Can you reproduce it and document the settings you used, or if you can reproduce it by mostly just clicking "Next" button in the installer? Because if you can't reproduce it, we can't fix it. For more information please have a look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_report_a_bug_properly

[rAC]

Could I add that I too found an install from the DVD (Mageia 2) took 3+ hrs, without any updates during the install, no bad block checks, reformating all partitions (logical volume one) except home and a custom choice of desktops (gnome and KDE).

[doktor5000]

Well, which part actually took so long for you? Installing packages?