d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe home on small drive, root not big enough

[Carl Karsten]

Not sure if this is really a bug. It depends on how smart the "home" recipe should be.

steps:
hardy, alt installer, preseed file, 5gig drive

d-i partman-auto/choose_recipe select home

It allocated 3.4 gig for /home, leaving 1.7gig for /, which isn't enough room for the rest of the install, it tried anyway and errored when it ran out of space.

Mar 4 06:39:04 debconf: --> SUBST partman/choose_partition CHOICES Guided partitioning, Help on partitioning, , SCSI1 (0\,0\,0) (sda) - 5.4 GB ATA QEMU HARDDISK , #1 primary 1.7 GB F ext3 / , #5 logical 238.5 MB F swap swap , #6 logical 3.4 GB F ext3 /home , , Undo changes to partitions, Finish partitioning and write changes to disk

config, logs and screen shot of error will be here for 2 weeks:
http://dev.personnelware.com/carl/temp/Mar04/b/qemu/

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Nasty. Unfortunately I suspect the obvious fix would cause problems for server installs; we don't really have the technology yet to make autopartitioning differ between those two.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

I've noticed, that / partition is too small on majority of disks these days - I've did some tests with small (8 GB) and large (250 GB) drives, used "separate home" partitioning scheme:
- with 8 GB drive installed created about 2,5 GB / partition, which is too small these days for desktop systems (see bellow why);
- with 250 GB disk installer created less than 7 GB / partition and 3 GB swap partition (computer has 1 GB of RAM). This is a nonsense - if user installs Ubuntu desktop on 250 GB hard drive then / partition should be at least 12 or 16 GB size - several big games (like openarena or nexus) and lots of upgrades will fill 7 GB pretty fast, especially when downloaded .deb files are leaved in /var/cache/apt/archives/
Also swap partition shouldn't be 50% size of / partition and 3x bigger than available RAM. It's always enough to have 2 GB swap partition for computers with 1 GB RAM - your computer will be not responsible when you have 1 GB RAM and running software will use 2 GB of swap.