[intrepid alpha6] You must know the format of your partition to enter the mount point

[Lionel Dricot]

Binary package hint: ubiquity

Trying to install Ubuntu Intrepid Alpha 6.

In the partition step, the new color are very pretty but, unfortunatly, not very intuitive and not useful at all. My collegua who was installing was unable to interpret it.

Choosing manual partitioning because we already had partitions :

In order to assign a mount point to a partition (/, /home, ...), you have to explicitely tell "Use this as ...EXT3".

It's a bug because :

- Most user don't want to know what EXT3 or anything else is.
- The system already know the answer, he's listing it on the fancy color bar !

I simply do not see the reason for this "use as..". The partition should be used if there's a mount point. The format should be listed and "ungreyed" only if the "format" box is checked.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

You obviously need the "Use as:" drop-down in case you want to *change* the partition type, but the bug is that it doesn't start out with the current partition type.

[Lionel Dricot (ploum-deactivatedaccount)]

I don't agree. If the partitions already exist, allowing the user to change the type will be confusing and very dangerous. It is only needed when formatting the partition, which is not the case here. (if it's the case, it totally hidden !)

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

Sometimes people do in fact want to change the partition type. It should be made clearer that the effect of this is to format the partition, which is bug 262504. One reason I am reluctant to make the UI flow the other way round is because that would be at odds with how the alternate installer's partitioner does it, although that does not necessarily mean it's impossible or even a bad idea. However, I don't want to get into that in this bug. I think it's quite sufficient for this bug to be about the poor handling of setting a mount point on an existing partition, and that the matter of how "Use as:" interacts with the format checkbox can be handled in bug 262504. Please respect that so that it's possible for us to deal with one bug at a time in a reasonable way.

I suspect that what we need to do to fix *this* bug is to rearrange the UI to split up the notion of the intended use of the partition ("method") from the intended contents of the partition. It would then be possible to display "existing ext3 file system, not used in this installation" from "existing ext3 file system, mounted somewhere". For file systems you can sort of infer this from whether a mount point is set, but it's a lot less clear for things like swap areas so I think it would be better to explicitly separate them.

[Kevin Puetz (puetzk)]

This also prevents you from setting up mount points for partition types the installer doesn't know how to format (HFS+, NTFS, etc). Not that it's terribly hard to add them later, but it would be nice to do it all at once

[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.]