touch-packages team mailing list archive

[Simon Reed <Xubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Is there no better solution than to say "Change your BIOS settings"?
There is nothing to put the idea in the user's mind that that may be the
problem, especially these days when many users have never seen a floppy
disk in their lives.

blkid will make gparted lock up for 20 minutes or more, other commands
fail much more quickly.  Because gparted calls blkid, one never sees any
output from blkid when it is causing gparted to seem to hang.  This
means people installing Linux for the first time think the installer
does not work and they are likely to go away and not come back saying
"Linux won't work on this PC".  A PC that likely has a functioning
Windows on it.

At the very least there needs to be some sort of clue to the user, for
example, programs that rely on blkid checking to see if it takes ages to
respond and then informing the user the BIOS might need changing to
match the actual drives installed, and the "System Requirements"
documents for the various distributions changed to say "make sure your
BIOS matches your installed drives because there is one time where it
will cause your PC to hang which is when you install Linux".

As it stands, this problem is an example of "Linux is too hard to use".

It actually took me over 20 hours of determined struggling to finally
work out why I could not seem to install Linux on my laptop, despite
trying many distros, and to work out it was this blkid / gparted
problem.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to util-linux in Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1044111

Title:
  blkid is hanging on probing nonexistant floppy drive

Status in util-linux package in Ubuntu:
  Invalid

Bug description:
  1. Lubuntu 12.10 i386 3.5.0-11-generic
  2. util-linux 2.20.1-5.1ubuntu1
  3. I expected sudo blkid to display partition stats. This bug is reference to bug #1029149 gparted never completing scanning all devices.
  4. I do not get the desired output from gparted or sudo blkid.

  The attached screenshot show the lack of results when using the sudo
  blkid command.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
  Package: util-linux 2.20.1-5.1ubuntu1
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-11.11-generic 3.5.2
  Uname: Linux 3.5.0-11-generic i686
  ApportVersion: 2.5.1-0ubuntu2
  Architecture: i386
  Date: Thu Aug 30 18:33:46 2012
  InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Alpha i386 (20120826)
  ProcEnviron:
   LANGUAGE=en_US:en
   PATH=(custom, no user)
   LANG=en_US.UTF-8
   SHELL=/bin/bash
  SourcePackage: util-linux
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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