they call it...installer

[jankushka]

just sharing this with you folks.

talking about the installer on feisty's live cd.

had to install another kubuntu on a box where i already have one.
10gb left on the disk.
want to share the /boot i already have there.
i manually partition the disc, of course.

here's a list of funny things with the installer:

a) creation of a partition

neither the "beginning" nor the "end" radio buttons, that define where you want
to position your partition in the available space, is checked.
if you don't say anything, the partition gets created...at the end.

the "mount point" drop down menu is empty.
you have to enter you mount point manually.

when you pick a file system such as ext3, you can't specify the (in)famous %reserved.
i guess it's still set at 5%.
which, suppose a 100gb file system, is quite a bit of a waste.

b) sharing /boot

the installer won't go on unless you format the /boot partition.
you have to let it create a boot dir under / and the go and move the files manually.

c) skipping the installation boot loader

there's no way you can choose to skip the installation of the boot loader.
you can fool the damn installer about, though.
if you click on the "advanced..." button, right at the start of the actual install
something pops up saying it will install grub in (hd0) or something.
you delete that and click ok.
now the thing will try to install grub in.../dev.
of course it won't be able to and will error out.
but you're at the end of the install, so you can happily forget about it.

and they call it...installer.

hth
cheers

[claydoh]

Re: they call it...installer

If you need more advanced install options, there is the Alternate cd. It is for these advanced situations where you need more control.

a) I did not have these problems creating partitions with the installer, or create mount points from my other drives. perhaps the livecd did not detect everything. I have had this happen in various different distros' live disks, sometimes rebooting helped, sometimes the burn was bad. Again, try the Alternate disk

b) Wouldn't sharing a /boot partition be very dangerous? I would think that installing another time to the same boot dir would overwrite some very important boot files of the main OS. It would be safer/simpler to just install the second OS's grub to the install partition (instead of the MBR), leave its /boot to be in the second root partiton, and add the second OS to your menu.lst.

c) see above, install grub to the partition and not the MBR, or use the Alt disk (you may need to pass an switch for advanced mode at the livecd's boot to be able to change/skip grub not sure on that one)