I think that the new Anaconda is missing some functionality that was previously available. If it's not missing, then it's really well hidden and I'd appreciate some help tracking it down.
As I mentioned in a previous email, FedUp hasn't worked on my laptop for reasons that I don't really understand. So I decided to go to Plan B which is an approach that I've used for many previous Fedora upgrades.
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one.
I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
If I'm being stupid and missing an obvious way to this, then can someone please put me out of my misery and tell me what to do.
Thanks,
Dave...
p.s. It seems I'm not the only person trying (and failing) to use this approach - http://mocktech.com/blog/2013/01/fedora-18-update-beginning-to-damage-my-cal...
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 01:59:37PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one. I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
Actually, I think this is a *very* important use case, and one you've explained well. In fact, I wouldn't mind a checkbox that tells the installer to just do exactly what you've said. I don't see anything in Bugzilla about this -- can you file an RFE bug? The developers will not see your message on this list.
On 23 January 2013 14:10, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 01:59:37PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one. I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
Actually, I think this is a *very* important use case, and one you've explained well. In fact, I wouldn't mind a checkbox that tells the installer to just do exactly what you've said. I don't see anything in Bugzilla about this -- can you file an RFE bug? The developers will not see your message on this list.
RFE?
I'm very happy to raise a bug. But I'll leave it until this evening - so people have a chance to tell me what I'm doing wrong :-/
Dave...
Dave Cross wrote:
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one.
Can you try setting the F17 /home mount point to /home? It should move it from F17 to F18. You might have to click on an "advanced" button or something similar to see the mount point option.
On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 14:18:18 +0000 Dave Cross davorg@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 January 2013 14:10, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 01:59:37PM +0000, Dave Cross wrote:
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one. I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
Actually, I think this is a *very* important use case, and one you've explained well. In fact, I wouldn't mind a checkbox that tells the installer to just do exactly what you've said. I don't see anything in Bugzilla about this -- can you file an RFE bug? The developers will not see your message on this list.
RFE?
Request for Enhancement. Not clear how an update would help the installer though because the system would need to be installed before you can update. New spins is the only way out for this to matter, if this is fixed.
I'm very happy to raise a bug. But I'll leave it until this evening - so people have a chance to tell me what I'm doing wrong :-/
Nothing, that is the problem.
Ranjan
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2013/1/23, Dave Cross davorg@gmail.com:
[...]
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one.
It's all quite confusing, but these may help:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/s1-dis... http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/s1-dis...
I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
I'd be surprised if it was not a common use case...
Andras
On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 08:26:18 -0600, Michael Cronenworth wrote:
Dave Cross wrote:
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one.
Can you try setting the F17 /home mount point to /home? It should move it from F17 to F18.
It's exactly that. It doesn't "move" it, though, but reuses it. I also used a shared /home, and since it's listed for the other recognized "Linux" installations, I unfold one of those and fill in the mount-point at the right side of the screen.
Michael Schwendt wrote:
It's exactly that. It doesn't "move" it, though, but reuses it. I also used a shared /home, and since it's listed for the other recognized "Linux" installations, I unfold one of those and fill in the mount-point at the right side of the screen.
I'd file an RFE on that then. The UI needs all the help it can get.
Allegedly, on or about 23 January 2013, Dave Cross sent:
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk.
When I used to do the same thing, on older releases, I didn't try to get the installer to make use of my old home partition. I'd set it to ignore them, completely. I'd pick the other partition(s) to install the new release into, let it just create a home directory in the root of the tree, as it will do by default. Then, post installation, I'd mount the old home partition on top of the new home directory.
I'd rather the installer left prior partitions completely alone. I don't want them doing anything to them, such as format them. Yes, I know there were tick boxes for format/not-format selected partitions, but mistakes are easy to make.
On 01/23/2013 09:38 AM, Andras Simon wrote:
2013/1/23, Dave Cross davorg@gmail.com:
[...]
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one.
It's all quite confusing, but these may help:
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/s1-dis... http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Installation_Guide/s1-dis...
I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
I'd be surprised if it was not a common use case...
Actually there is a LOT in the /home/user directory that can be version specific. All those dot directories. From F15 to F16 for gnome 2 to 3 would have been VERY painful.
I rsync all my data to an external drive, do a total install. Make sure it is working. Install other stuff I want, THEN rsync the data back. I guess I got burned some time ago on this and once burned...
Am 23.01.2013 20:00, schrieb Robert Moskowitz:
Actually there is a LOT in the /home/user directory that can be version specific. All those dot directories. From F15 to F16 for gnome 2 to 3 would have been VERY painful.
well but this is still there after a new install and restore data or with /home untouched
I rsync all my data to an external drive, do a total install. Make sure it is working. Install other stuff I want, THEN rsync the data back. I guess I got burned some time ago on this and once burned...
i made some hundret upgardes with yum, all of them succesfull i made 3 upgrades with DVD, 2 of them did not boot
i made one with preupgrade, failed and after upgrade again with DVD more work than ever
so for me upgrades with YUM are since FC3 the best option and anaconda is only touched on new machines where i have no compareable because of disk sizes layout to dd-dump over ssh or simp,ly pull out a RAID-disk and resync existing and new machine
the time i spent with 3 fresh upgrades to have my RAID-disk-layout as i want it or even was not possible to have /boot as first partition on all 4 drives i make 5 dist-upgrades with YUM
On 01/23/2013 06:54 AM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
It's exactly that. It doesn't "move" it, though, but reuses it. I also used a shared /home, and since it's listed for the other recognized "Linux" installations, I unfold one of those and fill in the mount-point at the right side of the screen.
Can you tell the new anaconda not to mount that partition at all? If so, it shouldn't format it either. (Always back everything up first, JIC!) Then, after installation and reboot, firstboot will start. Before creating your first normal user, go to an alternate terminal and log in (of course) as root. Edit fstab to add that partition and use mount -a to reprocess fstab. Exit and go back to firstboot. Yes, this is a disgusting kludge, but it does look like it will work around the glaring bug in anaconda.
BTW, has this problem (not being allowed to exclude a mounted partition from formatting) been reported to bugzilla? If not, it should be and if so, everybody on this list who's been caught by it should add comments. Yes, I understand that a large number of comments on a bug report isn't enough by itself to get it fixed sooner[1], but if the severity of the bug is high enough it can't hurt. If nothing else, whoever's responsible for anaconda won't be able to say that nobody complained about it.
[1]There's one alacarte bug with several hundred comments. The only "fix" for it suggested was to manually patch the program and the patch didn't work! These things happen, and it's not like alacarte's a high-priority issue.
On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:57:07 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:
It's exactly that. It doesn't "move" it, though, but reuses it. I also used a shared /home, and since it's listed for the other recognized "Linux" installations, I unfold one of those and fill in the mount-point at the right side of the screen.
Can you tell the new anaconda not to mount that partition at all? If so, it shouldn't format it either.
/home? There's a "Reformat" checkbox right of the mount-point field. There are also other fields one would need to activate explicitly before one could choose them (e.g. the filesystem when reformatting).
On 01/23/2013 01:36 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
/home? There's a "Reformat" checkbox right of the mount-point field. There are also other fields one would need to activate explicitly before one could choose them (e.g. the filesystem when reformatting).
Yes. I've been reading about problems with the new anaconda's partitioning and mounting where people haven't been able to select a partition for /home without formatting it. (Apparently the checkbox telling it not to format the partition is grayed out.) I was suggesting a possible work around for cases where you wanted to preserve the contents of /home and anaconda was insisting on reformatting it.
El mié, 23-01-2013 a las 13:59 +0000, Dave Cross escribió:
I think that the new Anaconda is missing some functionality that was previously available. If it's not missing, then it's really well hidden and I'd appreciate some help tracking it down.
As I mentioned in a previous email, FedUp hasn't worked on my laptop for reasons that I don't really understand. So I decided to go to Plan B which is an approach that I've used for many previous Fedora upgrades.
I have a separate /home partition which contains all of my important data. Therefore I want to do a new installation of Fedora 18 but reuse the existing /home partition. In the old Anaconda that was simple. I'd just use set up a customised partition layout, telling it to reuse the /home partition and to do what it wanted with the rest of the disk. But I can't work out how to do that on the new version of Anaconda. The new partitioning sets up this artificial distinction between the old Fedora 17 installation and the new Fedora 18 one and I can't see how to tell the new installation to use a partition from the old one.
I accept that this probably isn't a really common use case, but it seems a shame to lose functionality that some of your users are using.
If I'm being stupid and missing an obvious way to this, then can someone please put me out of my misery and tell me what to do.
Thanks,
Dave...
p.s. It seems I'm not the only person trying (and failing) to use this approach - http://mocktech.com/blog/2013/01/fedora-18-update-beginning-to-damage-my-cal...
-- Dave Cross :: dave@dave.org.uk http://dave.org.uk/ @davorg
Hello!
I have a separate /home like you. What I did, as fair I can remember, is this:
1. Tick in the little line below where says: "I don't need help for..." 2. Than press Forward and select the partition to install system and tick on "Format". Mount point: / 3. Select my /home partition with Mount point as /home and nothing more. Don't touch nor tick anything. 4. Select Swap and tick on "Format". Mount point: Swap. 5. Check that everything is OK. 6. Press on a button below that says: "Apply". You have to do this 'apply' on every partition you will use. 7. Then press "Finnish" (or something like that) and if you're lucky and everything is fine your installation will start without problems.
Note that I'm translating from Spanish install.
Hope this can help you, Lailah
On 01/23/2013 04:36 PM, Michael Schwendt wrote:
On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:57:07 -0800, Joe Zeff wrote:
It's exactly that. It doesn't "move" it, though, but reuses it. I also used a shared /home, and since it's listed for the other recognized "Linux" installations, I unfold one of those and fill in the mount-point at the right side of the screen.
Can you tell the new anaconda not to mount that partition at all? If so, it shouldn't format it either.
/home? There's a "Reformat" checkbox right of the mount-point field. There are also other fields one would need to activate explicitly before one could choose them (e.g. the filesystem when reformatting).
I'm not familiar with Fedora, but it seems logical that you could set up the partitions you want using GParted, format the ones you want formatted, and then not let Fedora mess with the partitions at all--just install to those that are there already. --doug
On 01/23/2013 05:26 PM, Doug wrote:
I'm not familiar with Fedora, but it seems logical that you could set up the partitions you want using GParted, format the ones you want formatted, and then not let Fedora mess with the partitions at all--just install to those that are there already.
Even if you do that, you're going to have to tell anaconda what partition to mount where. And, unless you can tell it not to format the partitions there's no point in having GParted do it. Up until now, there was a checkbox available that told anaconda to use the partition as is, but there are reports of people finding it grayed out and that's what we've been discussing.
On Wed, 23 Jan 2013 20:26:24 -0500 Doug wrote:
I'm not familiar with Fedora, but it seems logical that you could set up the partitions you want using GParted, format the ones you want formatted, and then not let Fedora mess with the partitions at all--just install to those that are there already.
That might seem logical, but logic didn't seem to play any part in the design of the parts of anaconda that purport to have something to do with partitioning.
I did indeed install on partitions I setup manually outside of anaconda, but I did it by installing in a virtual machine then copying the virtual machine disk image to my desired root partition and fixing the grub config to change the UUIDs and other disk references:
http://home.comcast.net/~tomhorsley/game/f18-install.html
There is no way I would let an interface that won't let you discover what it plans to do install on my system (and will only indirectly let you ask it to do something - it is sort of like playing billards - you have to setup elaborate bank shots and hope the ball falls in the right partition).
-
Andras Simon -
Dave Cross -
Doug -
Joe Zeff -
Matthew Miller -
Michael Cronenworth -
Michael Schwendt -
Ranjan Maitra -
Reindl Harald -
Robert Moskowitz -
Sylvia Sánchez -
Tim -
Tom Horsley