I had a recent Ubuntu install that stopped working after some packages were upgraded so I decided to take the opportunity to install Kubuntu (and keep my /home and several other partitions) and just replace my old / and /usr partitions with Kubuntu instead of fixing what was wrong with them. The installer, with manual partition management, didn't give me that option... well, not so surprising because I had used RAID and logical volumes, but I had some spare unpartitioned space so I used that for Kubuntu. The odd thing though was that I could see my other old partitions that were plain ext4 during the install process but I couldn't find anyway to say I wanted them to be mounted. I tried clicking, double-clicking, all the pull-down menus, but the mount point remained blank. Never mind, I thought, I'll carry on with the installation and mount them afterwards.
After logging in there seems to be no option other than manually editting /etc/fstab. I can do that, but surely this is a common enough scenario... either dual-booting and wanting some partitions to be used by both systems, or replacing one linux with another, and the rest of the process is GUI and a pretty nice interface. Some newcomers might find this difficult. And I have the problem that /home has already been made on the new partition... it can be messy mounting another /home after the system is up and I would have logged in with my /home in use.
Main points/suggestions from my experiences:
1. During the installation process, before asking the user about formatting the disk (especially if the first options will wipe existing data), have the installer ask "Do you have data/files/emails/settings on this disk you need to keep?", perhaps preceding it with "I see this disk already has ntfs and linux partitions; I can keep all of these partitions because I see you have enough free space to install ... as well, or I can keep just the user-data part of the linux sysrtem and replace the system files with the fresh system, and/or I can arrange for a boot menu that allows you to choose to boot an existing operating system or this new one, but only if you say yes to this question...".
2. During manual partition management the user has to be able to elect whether to mount these partitions, and where. Perhaps get clues from an existing /etc/fstab if it exists?
3. The widest possible range of partition types should be recognised, including RAID, logical volumes, and so on... even if the installation program cannot, as yet, use them it should at least alert the user to what is there and warn that it isn't able to handle the situation itself.
4. Most importantly, after the partitioning choices are made but before any formatting occurs, the installation software really ought to say something like: "You have decided to... and the following partitions will be created/wiped-and-reformatted/used "as-is"/totally ignored by the installation process..." and then allow the user to alter settings in the table (including mount point settings, whether data is kept, whether the partition is scanned for errors). It would be nice at that stage (and earlier ones) if all the options that are about to be taken in the install are in some text file and we have the option to switch to a shell, edit them, run fsck, etc... then return to the gui at which point any changes to the text file will update the screen.
5. When using the system there should be a "map (or mount) drive" option clearly in the file manager and in the system settings, to control user-requested mounting of removeable media but also as a way to get into a unified, simple interface to mount partitions and network resources... maybe KED's partition manager v 1.1 might be able to do some of this, but there should be some more obvious place to put it and deal with samba mounts, nfs mounts, what to do when DVD's and USB media are inserted, etc.
After logging in there seems to be no option other than manually editting /etc/fstab. I can do that, but surely this is a common enough scenario... either dual-booting and wanting some partitions to be used by both systems, or replacing one linux with another, and the rest of the process is GUI and a pretty nice interface. Some newcomers might find this difficult. And I have the problem that /home has already been made on the new partition... it can be messy mounting another /home after the system is up and I would have logged in with my /home in use.
Main points/suggestions from my experiences:
1. During the installation process, before asking the user about formatting the disk (especially if the first options will wipe existing data), have the installer ask "Do you have data/files/emails/settings on this disk you need to keep?", perhaps preceding it with "I see this disk already has ntfs and linux partitions; I can keep all of these partitions because I see you have enough free space to install ... as well, or I can keep just the user-data part of the linux sysrtem and replace the system files with the fresh system, and/or I can arrange for a boot menu that allows you to choose to boot an existing operating system or this new one, but only if you say yes to this question...".
2. During manual partition management the user has to be able to elect whether to mount these partitions, and where. Perhaps get clues from an existing /etc/fstab if it exists?
3. The widest possible range of partition types should be recognised, including RAID, logical volumes, and so on... even if the installation program cannot, as yet, use them it should at least alert the user to what is there and warn that it isn't able to handle the situation itself.
4. Most importantly, after the partitioning choices are made but before any formatting occurs, the installation software really ought to say something like: "You have decided to... and the following partitions will be created/wiped-and-reformatted/used "as-is"/totally ignored by the installation process..." and then allow the user to alter settings in the table (including mount point settings, whether data is kept, whether the partition is scanned for errors). It would be nice at that stage (and earlier ones) if all the options that are about to be taken in the install are in some text file and we have the option to switch to a shell, edit them, run fsck, etc... then return to the gui at which point any changes to the text file will update the screen.
5. When using the system there should be a "map (or mount) drive" option clearly in the file manager and in the system settings, to control user-requested mounting of removeable media but also as a way to get into a unified, simple interface to mount partitions and network resources... maybe KED's partition manager v 1.1 might be able to do some of this, but there should be some more obvious place to put it and deal with samba mounts, nfs mounts, what to do when DVD's and USB media are inserted, etc.
Comment