[Dapper beta 1] Poor usability of livecd installer partitioning tool
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ubiquity (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Colin Watson | ||
Bug Description
The livecd installer's partitioning tool:
-is rather slow (the least of these inconvenients, I guess)
-doesn't allow you to apply your changes in any other way than moving to the next step - not intuitive at all.
-isn't reliable when creating partitions: in my test I couldn't create an ext3 partition in the space freed by two others I just deleted; the file system of the created partition was labeled as unknown, and installation failed with a "no root filesystem" error. Creating the partition with cfdisk and formatting it with mkfs.ext3 worked fine, however, but then the installer crashed when trying to format the partitions.
-creating the partitions and selecting the mount points should NOT be two separate steps: this is error-prone since the mount point selection dialogue provides little info about the partition you are selecting. This is a regression compared to the text installer. A novice user could very easily format the wrong partition; and I found myself going back and forth between the partitioning tool (waiting for it to load every time) and the mount point selection to make sure I wasn't making mistakes with the partition numbers.
-- THE MODEL for the partitioning tool should be the one used in the Mandrake/Mandriva installation. (Maybe even import it from Mandriva, it should be GPL.) It's just perfect, and really gives you full control when used in expert mode. It allows you to apply your changes at any time, and you can use it to select mount points and format your partitions, all that in any order.
| Kasper Peeters (kasper-peeters) wrote | #1 |
| Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote | #2 |
| Cassie (denjin) wrote | #3 |
| Changed in ubiquity: | |
| status: | Unconfirmed → Confirmed |
| Colin Watson (cjwatson) wrote | #4 |
| Changed in ubiquity: | |
| assignee: | nobody → kamion |
| status: | Confirmed → Fix Released |
I had a similar experience: I removed an old ext3 partition, created an extended partition in the free space, containing two new ext3 logical partitions. However, when choosing the mount points, the 'reformat' checkbox for one of the logical partitions was greyed out, and continuing left me with a summary which showed 'reformat as' instead of the expected 'reformat as ext3'. Going back, unselecting and reselecting the reformat checkbox for the 1st logical partition and then 'forward' solved this problem, but this is clearly a bug.