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.
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.