Up until now I had not tried installing Dapper from scratch. I had only upgraded an existing Breezy system to Dapper and it went very smoothly.
Tonight I attempted to use the Dapper CD to install Dapper on to a 40 GB hard drive of which I had already had Windows 2000 setup in a 12 GB NTFS partition. The live CD boot up just fine and then I double-clicked install and answered all of the questions and let Dapper decide how to partition and format the remaining space. It did so and then proceeded to copy files only to crash when 81% through. The crash was in a program called “ubiquity” and there is a bug report here. I actually tried the install several times and it failed with the same error.
The nasty thing was that GRUB was never installed and the unusable /dev/hda2 ext3 Ubuntu root partition was set bootable so the system is not bootable, including my previously working Windows 2000. I fixed this by booting into the Dapper live CD and using fdisk to turn off the boot flag for /dev/hda2 while turning it on for the /dev/hda1 NTFS partition. This restored my ability to boot Windows.
It’s really unfortunate that a bug this serious wasn’t fixed before the release and before thousands of 6.06LTS CDs got shipped all over the world.
Most odd. We have had almost the inverse of each others experiences with Dapper it seems. Where I had a problematic upgrade from Breezy my CD install is working well, (with the exception of Ndiswrapper and Compiz bugs)
I had to do some tweaking on a laptop to sort out grub problems somewhere and wrote full notes, (on a packet of cigarette papers 🙂 ), on how to re-install and setup grub for dual boot with Windows. Perhaps this is not relevant though as you only have 3/4 of an install of dapper on there 🙁
Seems like a fix might be a while, perhaps go for the 5.1 install and then upgrade from the Dapper CD (if that’s possible)
That’s really too bad. Maybe nobody noticed the bug because they’re not big fans of dual booting Windows 😉
I noticed that Ubuntu suggested to partition my drive in two (to keep my existing Win’98–yes, yes, Win’98–install) but in the end I decided to ditch it completely so maybe that’s why I never saw the bug.
I hope you can work it out. I’ve found irc.freenode.net/ubuntu to be a great source of help.
Yeah… I personally don’t yet have faith in the GUI installer (yet) since it is a new thing for the Dapper release. I use the alternative installation disc, which offers more options, anyway (such as the use of LVM, and better control over things like partitioning, since I don’t like the way Ubuntu sets up partitions by default — I am still a fan of having most of the system on its own partitions as opposed to one big partition for the system, and another for /home).
Even with the alternative disc, though, I would say that installing it is a great deal easier then installing Windows — the Windows XP installer doesn’t know how to deal with other operating systems being present, and it doesn’t even know how to identify Linux partitions (which is probably done on purpose by Microsoft).
Hopefully, the kinks will be worked out of the graphical installer by the next release, though, because I am sure that there are a lot of people that want to use it.
It’s a lot better than the Gentoo 2006.0 Live CD installer. Eech that was horrible.
I haven’t been too happy with the new graphical installer, myself. I have encountered several systems that will not boot through to the desktop using the Live CD in either the normal or safe graphics modes. I have not had any trouble installing Breezy Badger and then upgrading to Dapper Drake, however. Given all the historical graphical misdetection issues, having the option for a text based installer is still very necessary, imo. At least then, you can install a system, find out that X isn’t working properly and fix it from the command line.
BTW, what plugin do you use for WordPress to get the number validation system for comments? I would love to add something like that to my blog. I currently use Akismet, and it works very well, but I think I would prefer your method.
To be honest I’ve given up on dapper and re-installed SUSE 10.1. Everything is now working as it should.Aaaah!!Bliss!!
I have had no problems installing Dapper from DVD. When it asked to partition I prefer to partition my self, just like fd0man, and put most things in their own partition.
My only problem with the Dapper GUI install was that it wouldn’t fit on the screen so I had to guess which button I had tabbed to. But I wiped out the Win2k install I had on there and just formatted the whole drive, so that would probably explain it.
A few more failed installs later (including Breezy) and an fsck later, I am suspecting that the problems were due to a flakey hard drive. Just moved though so all my stuff is in boxes and haven’t had a chance to try again. 🙂
I had lots of problems with the live installer… had to get the alternate installer. It did indeed put a damper on Dapper.
Well, that was my experience as well. In particular, the partitioning tool does not work too well, and the graphical installer bombed trying to install grub. I am quite surprised at the relatively low quality of the graphical installer for this release. but perhaps the problems manifest with only certain mobo’s? I can’t believe that they would not have tested things as completely as they were able…
On a separate note, my system would not boot from the 3Ware 8006-2lp card I had newly installed kubuntu 6.06 on, though I think that is due to my motherboard’s crappy BIOS. 🙂