Kubuntu 64-bit 16.04.3 installer is broken

[Ron Widell]

see this thread on the forum for details:
https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2372159

16.04.3 won't install to LVM disks.

However, it may be that it simply won't install to a BIOS/mbr machine (as noted in a different bug report)

[Marco Parillo (marco-parillo)]

I personally tested the guided - use entire disk and set up encrypted LVM option, but I know that is not exactly your bug report.

[Ron Widell (r-widell)]

After a number of experiments this weekend, I can say that the graphical installer is not COMPLETELY broken, It merely contains a fatal flaw.

It will only work if an LV file system is mounted on /, and optionally on /home. It will also allow an LV configured as swap. If those conditions are met, the / (root) partition will be mounted on /target and the /boot (a separate physical partition on the drive) and /home partitions will be mounted under /target/boot and /target/home respectively. In that configuration, the installation will proceed successfully and the OS will be installed to the drive.

Any attempt to use any other mount point will fail. The / (root) partition will be mounted under /tmp/tmp.LARGE_RANDOM_NUMBER and the other partitions will remain unmounted. Nothing will be written to the drive.

On the chance that there was an artificial limit on the number of mount points, I tried to install to a configuration of /boot (sda1), and LVs of / (root), swap and /var (instead of /home). The installation failed as described above.

The 64-bit Ubuntu-desktop image suffers the same flaw, I can only assume that all of the desktop images share this flaw.

Note that the 64-bit ubuntu-server image works as expected. It does NOT share this flaw.

I believe that at the very least, this flaw should be noted in the release notes.

As it stands, I see only two ways to upgrade my Kubuntu 14.04 system:
1) Install ubuntu server and then attempt to install KDE and the other desktop apps on top of that.
2) Install Kubuntu on a separate drive and then do a fork-lift upgrade by migrating the system from that drive to my original system.

Neither option is very appealing.