Installer partitioner project, dif Debian Ubuntu, lvm, UUID, GPartEd, GRUB, HAL

[Tom H]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:00 AM, Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> hi,
> Am Dienstag, den 27.04.2010, 19:27 -0400 schrieb Tom H:
>> >
>> Ubuntu started using grub2 by default (for clean installs) with 9.10.
>>
>> UUIDs have been usable in Ubuntu since 6.06 and in Debian since Etch.
>>
>> UUIDs have been used by default since Ubuntu 6.10 and Debian Lenny.
>>
>> HAL has nothing to do with UUID use. Ubuntu has not deprecated HAL
>> independently; the upstream freedesktop project has done so. sid
>> (Debian unstable) does not use HAL either.
>>
>> Regarding your laptop problem, I suspect that the installation of 9.10
>> changed the UUID of your swap partition. I don't understand your
>> problem ("the 9.4 was somehow booting
>> from/through the 9.10 partition") but someone posted that you might
>> not be able to add a partition because it would be a 5th primary
>> partition in an earlier post.
>>
>> 9.04's parted doesn't understand ext4.
>>
>> parted recognizes the devices underlying PVs and lists their size and
>> their lvm flag when "print" is run, but it cannot manipulate
>> PVs/LVs/VGs.
>>
>> Since gparted is, AFAIK, a front-end for parted, ...
>>
>> The alternate installer (and probably the live installer too) is the
>> debian installer and uses fdisk-udeb (which is different from
>> util-linux's fdisk) to partitions disks. I usually format disks with
>> parted or fdisk before installs and then select those partitions
>> during the install.
>>
> perfect explanation, apart from the fact that the installers partitioner
> is called partman (and thus partman-udeb is used)
>
> and yes, the live installer is just a different frontend.
> in the backend all debian-installer pieces are used, the installation
> *process* is very different though (ubiquity copies the content of the
> live filesystem and removes unwanted packages/configurations in the
> target system while the alternate installer installs package by package
> (which is significantly slower))

You beat me to the partman correction. A colleague just called me a
<deleted> idiot for the fdisk thing. :)

fdisk-udeb is used to build d-i images not partition disks for d-i.

And thanks for the live installer explanation. Fedora's does that: I
didn't realize/consider that Ubuntu's did it too.