Limit boot loader installation target

[Barry Warsaw]

In bug 933433 the user attempted to install the boot loader on an XFS file system, which does not reserve space. This causes a follow-on bug that will be fixed separately as part of bug 933433. However, in general, cjwatson says:

<cjwatson> barry: firstly, the user was allowed to select an XFS partition as
           a target for boot loader installation (impossible since XFS doesn't
           reserve space) [17:22]

<cjwatson> actually should not be allowed to select anything that doesn't
           reserve embedding space
<cjwatson> that can be data-mined from the grub2 source

<cjwatson> 'grep reserved_first_sector grub-core/fs/*' [17:29]
<cjwatson> if there's a filesystem in the target partition, it must be one of
           those with = 1 there

[Barry Warsaw (barry)]

So, doing the grep as you suggest gives me these supportable filesystems:

    'btrfs',
    'ext2',
    'fat',
    'hfsplus',
    'nilfs2',
    'ntfs',

so I think you have to special case (i.e. manually add to the list) ext3 and ext4 also, and probably fat16 and fat32 too. Am I missing something?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubiquity - 2.9.32

---------------
ubiquity (2.9.32) precise; urgency=low

  [ Stéphane Graber ]
  * panel: Fix the gtk3 css code so that it actually applies and add
    another override for the .menuitem padding that was making the panel
    28px large instead of 24px. (LP: #960998)
  * Only allow for one orca instance at a time. (LP: #945133)
  * Fix crash in set_indicator_keymaps when reaching the fallback code
    of the keyboard layout guesser. Added a test for it. (LP: #961003)
  * Make sure all the widgets of the quit dialog are always visible.
    (LP: #960600)
  * Switch to a single install_size() function in misc called by ubi-prepare
    and by ubi-partman. Tweak the resize partition sizes to enforce the
    minimum partition size in resize mode too. (LP: #960628)
  * Change ubiquity's virtual terminal to calling 'busybox tail' instead of
    'tail' to workaround the inotify on overlayfs bug.
  * panel: Only show icons, not labels, fixing our current "corruption"
    problem where the keyboard layout gets associated with another entry.
    (LP: #960039)
  * panel: Add a list to enforce the indicator ordering. (LP: #960036)
  * Automatic update of included source packages: migration-assistant
    0.6.11.

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Make sure to load translations for "USB" and "CD" on the language page
    (LP: #958249).
  * Sort existing images in the face selector by filename.
  * Force face selector icon view to a two-column layout, in lieu of better
    geometry management (LP: #961025).
  * Refactor ubiquity.misc.grub_default to make it testable, and add tests
    for it.
  * Make test_misc pass when run on its own. Apparently
    GdkX11.x11_get_default_xdisplay() segfaults if Gtk hasn't been imported
    (or possibly something finer-grained); so import Gtk from
    misc.set_indicator_keymaps even though we don't actually use it
    directly.

  [ Oliver Grawert ]
  * bin/oem-config-firstboot: do not reset debconf user data in automatic mode
  * ubiquity/plugins/ubi-tasks.py: run tasksel with --new-install option in
    automatic mode (this still doesnt make tasksel work, but at least skips
    the debconf question if tasksel isnt in the preseed file, to install
    packages late-command needs to be used atm.
  * bin/ubiquity: make debconf not re-show seen questions again in automatic mode
  * all the above fixes (LP: #924018), example boot.scr and preseed.cfg file are
    attached to the bug, thanks to colin for all the fixes and the hard work.

  [ Barry Warsaw ]
  * Do not offer to install the boot loader on device paths on which
    incompatible file systems will be installed (e.g. XFS).
    (LP: #959724)
 -- Stephane Graber <email address hidden> Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:49:14 -0400