Fwd: One Button Installer, 'OBI'

[Nio Wiklund]

On 2013-09-13 23:58, Aere Greenway wrote:
> On 09/13/2013 02:41 PM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
>> The purpose was and is to make it simple, very simple. There is 'no
>> button' for multiple partitions. The OBI uses and makes only one root
>> partition and one swap partition on one drive.
>>
>> Maybe in the future I might make a modified and more advanced version.
>> I'm thinking of partitioning with gparted, and running the One Button
>> Installer afterwards. The unallocated space or the extended partition
>> might be used. Or specific partitions. Do you think many people (or even
>> most linux users) need dual or multiple boot?
>>
>> But it can select drives, so if you have several drives, internal and
>> external, the OBI can select which one to use as target for the
>> installation. You can install to any of several internal drives or to a
>> USB HDD, USB pendrive, flash card or eSATA drive.
>>
>> One interesting thing to make is a portable system on a USB pendrive or
>> a USB HDD (at least 4 GB for Lubuntu and Bodhi, at least 8 GB for the
>> other systems). A cheap USB 2 pendrive or flash card is rather slow, but
>> usually it works. (If it can boot with an iso file, it can boot with
>> grub, that is used with the OBI.)
>>
>> Maybe you could use one computer temporarily for testing:-D
> Nio:
> 
> Thanks for the additional information.
> 
> You might want to include a warning (if you don't have it already) that
> the installation will reformat the entire (selected?) drive, destroying
> all existing partitions on that drive.
> 
> If I hadn't thought carefully about this before trying it, I would have
> wreaked havoc on the unfortunate machine I used it on.
> 
> I think a good behavior for it, would be that if it saw multiple
> partitions on the target drive, it would allow the user to choose one of
> them for installation (Windows 7 upgrade does something like that).
> 
> Of course, if you have to implement an OS-prober (like what GRUB does),
> that could be a lot of work.
> 
There are several warnings, see the big one in the second attached
picture in the opening post of this thread in the Ubuntu Forums

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2172971

WARNING Copy the data you want to keep to another device, for
WARNING example an external hard disk drive or a cloud service!
WARNING
WARNING When you run this installer, a new operating system will
WARNING be installed, so the device will be formatted and
WARNING
WARNING **********  COMPLETELY OVERWRITTEN  *********
WARNING
WARNING There will be no easy way to recover any previous data.
WARNING Expensive intelligence services might restore some data.

I think you would have noticed it ;-)

Making the OBI a dual boot installer would defeat its purpose. I think
it is better to use the existing installers to do that, the alternate
installer, if there is too little RAM or problems with the graphics for
the desktop installer.

Best regards/Nio