Mandrake-style repartitioning in the installer?

[Stephen R Laniel]

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.

We need this, badly. Ubuntu is a more usable distribution
than Mandrake, and I think it's probably the best end-user
Linux distro available now. With a repartitioner, it would
be golden.

I have a near-term project for myself, which is to run
Ubuntu for a month without using the command line or console
apps (right now I'm using mutt), as a way of getting used to
the tools that ordinary users are going to use. Then I
intend to send all my friends copies of the Ubuntu Live CD.
I don't feel like I can do this until it's possible to
resize an existing Windows partition to fit Linux on the
disk.

Is there any chance that Ubuntu will get an installer like
Mandrake's within the near future? Offhand, does anyone know
how the Mandrake installer is licensed? A little googling
suggests that it's written in Perl, which tells me that
they're not terribly concerned about keeping the code
secret.

-- 
Stephen R. Laniel
steve at laniels.org
+(617) 308-5571
http://laniels.org/
PGP key: http://laniels.org/slaniel.key