The Ubuntu Installation Guide

It fails to explain how to set up a dual boot system, and it fails to explain how to use the Manual Partitioning options.

@tracyanne You're right dual boot should have been included. I will add a page to the guide that covers this. The last page of the guide covers manual installations. However the video is much more basic and does not.

Anyone have opinion of Ubuntu starting to limit the options in the installer? It is easier, but is it better?

limiting the presented options is fine, as long as just leave the other options available. Just have an 'advanced options' button.

This is a gripe I have with gnome. The gnome screensaver is the standard x screensaver, with many options removed. They are not put on another screen behind an 'options' or 'advanced options' button. Most of the options removed are basic and should be given to the user.

However the gnome philosophy seems to be to oversimplify.

So go ahead and simplify the main menu for installs, but leave a way to get to all of the advanced options that is easy.

gnome screensaver options can still be set by editing the config files. How windows 3.1 is that?

actually aweber, the partitioning option that canonical provide is not a very good solution. a single partition for both applications and user files is really silly makes the Ubuntu install very similar to Windows, with all the problems of having user files and applications on the same partition.

A better default install would be what Mandriva have done at least as long as I've been using Linux (2000) three partitions, root, swap and home. that way user files are kept separate from system and applications files.

This could cost Ubuntu as mid level Linux users move to some of these other, more flexible options.

@aweber, pardon, please explain.

I think he is implying that a user who starts with Ubuntu may switch to a distro that offers more flexibility in an easily used way like Mandriva or SuSE. They might not be ready for slackware or gentoo, but might get the itch to try some different install techniques.

It could be true.

There is a large body of current Linux users in the world. Focusing only on those newly switching from Windows could mean losing some who have already switched but still may not be ready to do everything on their own.

@number6x oh, yeah, that makes sense.

I keep /home and / on separate partitions. It's the only way.

Quoting:I keep /home and / on separate partitions. It's the only way.

Too bad it leads to wasted space and/or not enough space on one of the partitions (or both). I can't stand it. Btrfs subvolumes would fix that and I hope installers will support it soon.

Desn't bother me at all. I've only ever run out of space once, after downloading a lot of Linux ISOs for testing, and not bothering to delete the old ones after I'd finishe with them. Got a warning telling me my /home partition was getting full. Mind you I only had an 80 gig HDD at the time.

Quoting:Too bad it leads to wasted space and/or not enough space on one of the partitions (or both). I can't stand it.

I do it in this order:

/swap (primary)

/ (primary)

/home (logical on extended)

That way I can use Gparted with a live CD to adjust the size of any or all of the partitions, should I need more in any one or two.

You could also reverse this and put /swap at the end of the drive (some people think the most-accessed portions of the drive should be at the beginning because that data can be accessed more quickly, but I don't bother with that ...).

And I keep /home in an extended partition so I can easily shrink it and add any number of further logical partitions, should that need arise (so far it hasn't, but it very well could).

Quoting:some people think the most-accessed portions of the drive should be at the beginning because that data can be accessed more quickly

For desktop usage, it's a crap shoot.

Are you booting? You're using / and /usr.

Are you logging in? You're using /usr and /home.

Are you opening a document? If you double-clicked, you're using /home at first, and then /usr. Reverse that if you opened it from the command-line. And, you might incur some page-swapping.

Should any of these be near the spindle? The necessary partition data is probably cached, so it shouldn't matter.

If you need a speed boost, and you can't add RAM, you'll probably be better off putting multiple swap spaces, and external journals/logs, on separate drive controllers.

The goal, in my mind, is to use /swap as seldom as possible.