Manual disk-partitioner crashes during Kubuntu 11.10 installation

[markusl]

I'm running in VMWare with four virtual disks. I had configured two partition tables and full-sized partitions without problems. I set up a swap partition, but as soon as the partman returned to the list of disks, it crashed.

The problem is repeatable two times out of two, and in the same place. This unfortunately means that Kubuntu is not installable on my PC. I'll download another flavour of Ubuntu and see whether it has the same problem.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: ubiquity 2.8.7
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-12.20-generic 3.0.4
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
CasperVersion: 1.287
Date: Fri Oct 14 21:34:11 2011
LiveMediaBuild: Kubuntu 11.10 "Oneiric Ocelot" - Release amd64 (20111012)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: ubiquity
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Dave Gilbert (ubuntu-treblig)]

Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: Exception in KDE frontend (invoking crash handler):
Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: Traceback (most recent call last):
Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/kde_components/PartitionModel.py", line 104, in parent
Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: return self.createIndex(parentItem.row(), 0, parentItem)
Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: File "/usr/lib/ubiquity/ubiquity/frontend/kde_components/PartitionModel.py", line 168, in row
Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: if self.parentItem:
Oct 14 21:33:30 ubuntu ubiquity[9200]: AttributeError: TreeItem instance has no attribute 'parentItem'

[markusl (markus-mnslaker)]

Thanks for that Google fodder, Dave: you beat me to it. :-)

The workaround for this bug is to download and install Ubuntu (rather than Kubuntu), partitioning your disk(s) as you wish, but allowing a few GiB more in your root partition than you'd normally need. I gave it 15GiB, which was more than enough. Once the installer has finished, boot up your new Ubuntu installation, log into Unity, and install KDE using any of the usual methods of installing software. You can then log out of Unity and into KDE.

I found when I did this that the system started leaking memory like a sieve -- tens of KiB per second -- but rebooting my 11.10 VM promptly, while it was still responsive, solved that. Oddly, I couldn't find an obvious culprit in top(1), but I didn't spend long looking. Early indications are that my new KDE installation is now stable.

People short of disk space can presumably uninstall Unity and parts of Gnome once KDE is running well, but I quite like having Unity available in case I do something stupid to KDE and need to recover it. (A well-configured jEdit beats vi any day.)

[dino99 (9d9)]

This version has expired for some time