Damn ubuntu.

[Michael Butash]

On 01/05/2014 12:14 PM, Brian Cluff wrote:
> I've managed to do a RAID install a couple of times from the desktop CD,
> but what a pain in the butt!  The only reason that I didn't just reach
> for a server CD was that I was either behind extremely slow Internet, or
> didn't have access to it in the first place, and it's only slightly
> easier to go through the pain of hand creating a RAID from the desktop
> CD than it is to convert a non-RAIDed system to a RAID 1 afterwards.
>
> That being said, the Desktop install does fill the needs of the vast 
> majority of users and gives them that "pretty" interface they they 
> expect from a professional product.
> It would be nice if they would have the Desktop install fail over to a 
> server/text style install if a graphical environment isn't able to 
> start, or if you press a key while it's booting for those of us that 
> would like a RAID setup or "advanced" install.

I was pretty bummed/hostile toward the fact they stopped producing the 
alt desktop installer versions.  As you say, the debian installer is 
about bulletproof whereas Ubuntu's desktop installer has always been a 
chronic basketcase for me to use.  So commonly so, I never know if its 
just gross incompetence or broken by design. They really need to keep 
that as a fallback just in case ubiquity continues to suck perpetually.

Case in point - I want to do raid.  The live desktop doesn't include 
mdadm natively (it does at least cryptsetup and lvm tools now), but puts 
the package in the archive to use on the disk.  Just flippin' install it 
by default and let users make the choice!  I think I found doing so, 
even after installing to the raided set built in the desktop, I still 
had to chroot to the install and add the package to the installation, 
and rebuild the initrd before reboot lest I see an (initrd) prompt.  
Good thing grub setup didn't setup my efi properly and I didn't even get 
that far!

Apparently the community needs to come together to figure out a 
"standard" around partitioning for EFI as well.  Arch and Ubuntu seem to 
handle partitioning and expectations very differently - that was about 
60% my constant issue, figuring out exactly what they wanted via trial 
and error.  Either should work, but they explicitly refuse to work with 
each other's methods...

Also how to make those pesky fat32 partitions redundant with mirrored 
disks...  At least without efi, I could mdraid /boot, and don't want to 
deal with fakeraid bs.  I have to mount the secondary efi as /boot/efi1 
to setup an rsync cron to copy the files - at least grub install in the 
deb installer writes both entries to the efi bios loader should/when one 
fails.

>
> Brian Cluff