The Tumbleweed Offline Installer Is the Agama Test Worth Running First

Pulling the network cable is a useful way to start an Agama test. It answers a question the network installer cannot: can you get a Tumbleweed machine ready with what is already on the ISO? openSUSE put a new x86-64 offline image in its download directory last week. The project announced on November 9 that it expects Agama to take over from YaST on the main Tumbleweed download page before the year ends.

What the ISO can do on its own

Pick the offline image if you want to test a machine that normally comes up without internet access. It includes a cache of packages, so the installer can build the system from local media. There’s another Agama image for network installs. That one has been available for longer and lives in the appliances ISO directory. Try it if that’s how you normally set up Tumbleweed. A result from one image doesn’t establish what the other one can install without a connection.

Think back to the last time you used YaST to set up a machine. Was there one package you always added from the picker? Agama doesn’t offer that picker. It gives you a shorter set of patterns, and the selection on screen is smaller than the range of patterns in the repositories. Write down the things you’d need at the first login. Then check for them after boot. That’s a better check of an offline build than counting how many patterns you can choose. A missing tool can be easy to add once you have a connection and difficult to get if you brought the machine somewhere without one.

Save the old media until you test your layout

The change may matter most on a machine with more than one disk. Try your usual layout with spare disks and see which disk the installer uses and which one the firmware boots afterward. openSUSE wants reports from people using RAID, LVM, several disks and serial consoles. If you find a difference from YaST, give the project the image version and the layout it takes to reproduce it.

When we covered Agama 25, the new browser terminal was available but there was no Tumbleweed adoption window. Now there is a target. The switch is tied to openQA and staging work, and the main download hasn’t moved yet. Keep the old ISO handy for the next rebuild. If you already have Tumbleweed running, the download change is about how you set up the next machine. It doesn’t require a reinstall of that running system.