Mandrake-style repartitioning in the installer?

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Mon May 16 04:15:23 CDT 2005


On Sun, May 15, 2005 at 11:21:07AM -0400, Stephen R Laniel wrote:
> The most (and only) useful thing in Mandrake is its
> installer, which is gorgeous. I realize that Debian
> installers have a higher bar to hit, namely that they can
> work on a much broader class of hardware. However, the
> Mandrake installer's great coup is its effortless ability to
> repartition a hard drive. It spots an NTFS/FAT/FAT32
> partition and asks if you want to resize it. Voila: a
> Windows machine instantly converted to Linux.

That sounds pretty much identical to:

  http://udu.wiki.ubuntu.com/InstallerSimpleResize

I've already implemented most of this, although I haven't quite got
round to testing it yet. The code turned out to be pretty
straightforward. At the moment it will look for any resizable large
partition (the current list is swap, ext2, ext3, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS),
although it would be a one-line change to limit it to Windows
filesystems if that turns out to be appropriate.

> Is there any chance that Ubuntu will get an installer like
> Mandrake's within the near future?

We're not going to be completely swapping out our installer and
replacing it with a different one; we've put far too much effort into it
for that, and it provides us with many useful features which would take
considerable effort to reimplement elsewhere. However, we will certainly
continue to enhance the installer to add this and other features.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]



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