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A small suggestion: Gparted

 

I have come back to looking at Lubuntu recently after a while away. I
put 10.04 LTS on a client's old workstation (P4, 256MB RAM, 40G hard
disk) and today 10.10 on my own laptop (PIII-750, 320MB, 20GB HD).

Both times, I've had the same problem, but it was more severe with 10.10.

I wanted to dual-boot the machines - the P4 with XP and the P3
notebook with Crunchbang. This means repartitioning, which means I
need Gparted (or something like it).

On 10.04, I was able to open a terminal, apt-get install gparted, then
run it, repartition, and install.

On 10.10, though, once I had installed Gparted, it filled up the
system's RAMdisk and crashed the desktop. No panel, no window manager,
nothing, just the desktop and Ubiquity icon.

I rebooted and tried again. This time I could run Gparted and make a
new root filesystem, but then I couldn't run Ubiquity. No error was
produced. I looked at the properties of the icon to see the command
but it does not show this rather critical info. I opened a terminal,
took a guess and changed to /home/lubuntu/Desktop and examined the
file with "less".

This gave me the basic command to run. Not knowing what the switches
and parameters mean, I just tried "ubiquity". It failed, segfaulted,
with an error that there was no space on root.

I rebooted, ran it again from the desktop, and then was able to install.

I rebooted again, manually tweaked my /etc/default/grub file for the
kernel parms I need (the machine will not boot without acpi=force and
the screen looks very poor without vga=791, which also gets the
graphical boot screen working, which does not happen otherwise - I get
a text one that says Ubuntu not Lubuntu).

Update-manager ran and I accepted the default offerings. Installation
failed over a clashing library. I had to run

apt-get install -f

... then

apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade -y

... to resolve this.

So finally I have a working system, but install was a bit fraught!

The simplest improvement would be to bundle Gparted on the live CD.
There's plenty of room - 150MB spare on the disk and Gparted +
dependencies is under a tenth of that, I think - and that's
uncompressed.

The other issues, well, I have no direct suggestions, I was merely
reporting them.

It is a little bigger and slower than Crunchbang but then Crunchbang
is only Ubuntu 9.04. OTOH, Lubuntu has a full and rather attractive
desktop, whereas #! is deliberately super-minimal.

-- 
Liam Proven • Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven
Email: lproven@xxxxxxxxx • GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven@xxxxxxxxx
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 • Cell: +44 7939-087884 • Fax: + 44 870-9151419
AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven • MSN: lproven@xxxxxxxxxxx • ICQ: 73187508



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