Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 24 January 2005 17:28, Jeff Vian wrote:
>On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 15:31 -0600, akonstam at trinity.edu wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 24, 2005 at 01:00:04PM -0500, William Hooper wrote:
>> > Timothy Murphy said:
>> > > Emmanuel Seyman wrote:
>> > >> Fdisk has never been removed. It has always been availible
>> > >> for people who want more control over their partitioning than
>> > >> Disk Druid provides.
>> > >
>> > > What you are saying is that there is a secret code known to
>> > > experts for doing this.
>> >
>> > Again, the "secret code" is the standard keystroke for changing
>> > virtual terminals.
>> >
>> > [snip]
>> >
>> > > If you tell them
>> > > that something is dangerous you should assume that they have
>> > > heard you, and will either take care or else avoid that method
>> > > altogether.
>> >
>> > Unfortunately this isn't the case.  As a real-world example:
>> > https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-test-list/2003-July/msg00
>> >574.html
>> >
>> > > Incidentally, to the many people who have told me
>> > > I should have used Ctr-Alt-F2 rather than Alt-F2,
>> > > I actually explained at one point that I was installing in
>> > > text mode, as the X that comes with Fedora does not run
>> > > properly on my Sony Picturebook (C1VFK).
>> > > But Alt-F2 did not work for me either.
>> >
>> > WORKSFORME.  Perhaps your hardware has issues changing virtual
>> > terminals?
>>
>> Ok. if you are going from X to an alternate terminal you have to
>> type ALT- CTL- Fx . To back to X or another terminal then ALT - Fx
>> is enough. F7 usually represents the X terminal. In a text install
>> F1 and F2 will surfice. I just did this a week ago and I think F2
>> will take you out of the text install and F1 take you back to the
>> install. At worst I have the F1 and F2 reversed. But that
>> certainly works. -------------------------------------------
>
>Exactly my point.
>
>It seems Gene and others would like fdisk as one of the options
> during the install instead of *forcing* all those who have no clue
> about getting to a shell (Shall we say newbies) to use only the one
> tool someone has deemed safe (DD) or allowing it to autopartition. 
> Both of which choose their own way of organizing the partitons, and
> it seems to me that autopartitioning uses LVM (in addition to
> destroying existing partitions), which may not be ideal for some.
>
>What I do not understand is why choices are being removed from menus
> and hidden.  I thought this was about freedom to choose, as well as
> making it attractive and easy for new users.

Very well said, Jeff.  And to illustrate a similar problem, I've made 
5 (unsuccessfull) passes at installing BDI-Live-RC46 again today, on 
a seperate hard drive in this same machine, which uses cfdisk as its 
partitioning tool.  Its a little bit better than DD in my opinion, 
but its still flakey.  In 5 installs, only one run would allow me to 
set /dev/hda1 as the /boot partition, the other 4 refused to show me 
anything in the primary partition camp, starting at /dev/hda5 in its 
pulldown choices.  It looks as if one could type his answer into the 
box as the cursor can be placed there, but if focused on the text 
bos, it appears the keyboard is disabled.  At any rate, going after 
it with your favorite bug swatter would seem to be a pretty good 
idea, particularly if it can be made a bit more intuitive to run.

The lack of success is the installer script is not apparently setting 
its paths correctly, so when it comes time to setup the root and 
user, all of those useradd/groupadd/chpasswd etc tools aren't being 
found, so the passwd and group files are not being updated.  So on 
the reboot to actually run it, no passwords are recognized and you 
are locked out from logging in forever.  And it seems rather 
self-explanatory that you cannot get a great amount of work out of a 
machine you cannot run.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.