first experiences with U-G 15.04 beta 2

[Bart Schouten]

Hi,

I have not used Ubuntu-Gnome before. My context lies currently with 
Kubuntu. I have installed Ubuntu-Gnome to get a slight experience with it 
and to look around.

I installed on an existing system (preexisting LUKS setup, existing /boot 
partition). This requires the LUKS to be loaded during install. This 
requires a root prompt. It was hard to get a root prompt in the installer. 
Only the live session allowed this (sudo su).

After getting a root prompt and running cryptsetup, usually all it takes 
is to add a line to the /etc/crypttab prior to the initramfs being 
generated. This failed, possibly because of a full /boot partition. Grub 
was also not installed.

I had to keep booting the system with the existing Kubuntu image that was 
still there (on /boot) and manually run the update-initramfs && 
update-grub && grub-install, after clearing some space (delete one older 
kernel that was retained there) to get a correct boot procedure, but in 
the end this was not so hard (been there, done that).

I would suggest you do allow a root login from a TTY during the install.

It would also be very helpful if the installer was expanded to load an 
existing LUKS setup. The crypt functionality of the installer is very 
limited. Even the text-mode installer (e.g. Ubuntu Server) has some 
limitations (failings). It should not be hard to detect a LUKS container 
during install, e.g. cryptsetup isLuks wil do that for you. Then all it 
requires is for a user to be prompted with the password and to execute 
cryptsetup luksOpen on that.

Of course, not as a way to stall the system when the password is not 
given, and also not automatically to load the setup considering there may 
be setups the user does not want to load.

Perhaps that is not something for Ubuntu-Gnome to consider, but still.

This installer is being used by all the Debian systems and it is not 
helpful that it can do so little. (For some reason the text-mode installer 
at some point also failed to load cryptsetups, at some point stalling at 
73% whenever I tried, on some system).

The crypt thing in Linux is so easy. Cryptsetup does everything for you. 
It should not be hard to implement something like that....

The cryptsetup that does exist in the installer does not allow for device 
mapper names to be chosen. I mean the LVM setup. This may require a lot of 
customization later on. Also a thing to consider. It would be so easy if 
you could do custom LVM setups in there ;-)......

This was the installer experience for me in any case. I'll leave it at 
this for now.

Regards, Bart Schouten.