Ubiquity crashes silently if the user-dir cannot be created

[Vincent Hindriksen]

Excuse me for having no trace-log, but I had no internet on the moment of installing on this pc.
This bug occurs on both 8.04 as 8.10.

I use sda2 as "/", sda3 as "/home", sda4 as "/opt". When the installer wants to create /home/vincent which already exists and is empty, it crashes. The reason I have an empty directory is that I moved all files to a backup-location.

So there are 2 problems:
- Ubiquity crashes when the home-directory already exists and is empty.
- feedback is bad: I was not really aware the install failed and thought it was just finished. I've searched a lot for "grub error 15". This problem is with every crash! Idea 1: Let Grub show a message "the install did not succeed" and some explanation. Idea 2: wrap Ubiquity in a crash-handler which could give better feedback to the user.

If needed, I could do some more tests.

[Michael Axiak (mike-axiak)]

This bug hit me as well. As long as people format their hard drives there is no issue, but if there happens to be an empty user directory for whatever reason, it just crashes with no notification. It took me 2 hours to figure out what happened.

[Marcus Tomlinson (marcustomlinson)]

This release of Ubuntu is no longer receiving maintenance updates. If this is still an issue on a maintained version of Ubuntu please let us know.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for ubiquity (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]