Fedora desktop spin size issues, update

[David Zeuthen]

On Mon, 2009-07-06 at 18:21 -0400, Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 01:28:12PM -0400, David Zeuthen wrote:
> > [1] : yes, using live media for rescue ops is often a lot more
> > convenient that the usual Fedora rescue story... But that's not really
> > the point of this message and not worth bickering over.
> 
> Actually, I find the anaconda "Mount your system" under /mnt/sysimage 
> to be a VERY useful feature.  I would love to see that ported to the 
> LiveCD environment.  It keeps getting more difficult to manually mount 
> a system with RAID, LVM, and LUKS in just the right way so that 
> chroot, grub-install, and mkinitrd work correctly.

FWIW, Palimpsest (Applications->System Tools->Disk Utility) provides an
UI that can be used for starting/stopping Linux MD RAID arrays and also
unlocking LUKS volumes. At some point we want to add LVM support but the
core LVM / device-mapper toolset still needs some work there. Some day
this might work, who knows.

Anyway, Palimpsest currently doesn't help setting everything up as you'd
expect for recovery mode except for what is mentioned (it's handy
instead of having to look up the commands). However, I do agree recovery
mode would be nice to add - shouldn't be *too* hard, though it does
involves probing every file system for known operating systems
signatures (e.g. /etc/fedora-release) and, in case one is found,
inspecting (at least) the /etc/fstab file on that file system and then
correlating UUID=, LABEL=, /dev/disk/* etc. entries in said file with
what's on the system (including handling the cases where assembly of
e.g. RAID is needed). 

I want the user experience to be as simple as selecting a partition and
then clicking a "Mount OS in recovery mode" button and then (optionally)
dropping you to a chrooted shell where the things are mounted so you can
run commands. Totally doable, but not high on the priority list right
now....

     David