Mindstab.net

So it's reinstall time for my laptop. I've been sitting on the fence on weather to try Ubuntu Edgy or stick with Gentoo. I think there will be a post about that soon, but not here. Today I downloaded Ubuntu Edgy and thought I'd give it a try. I pop the livecd in and it comes up with a nice boot screen and then a nice Gnome desktop. I start the installer and it's graphical. I'm quite impressed so far. Right until I get to the disk set up part. I don't want to toast off my /home partition (obviously) so I choose manually partition. It brings up gpartd, I just skip through that because I don't want to change anything. Then I go to a screen about assigning mount points to partitions. Easy. Except it will not let me pass because it keeps insisting there is no root mount point even though I've very clearly assigned what should be root partition to the root mount point.

So here I am, stuck already. I boot up firefox on the livecd just long enough to find out this is a known problem, and I could maybe get around it by jumping on to the command line and trying my hand at manually reformatting certain partitions and maybe the installer would accept it. But if it doesn't then I have a dead laptop and I can't go download and burn the latest Gentoo livecd. And besides, I swayed to Ubuntu on the promise it would be easy to use and manage. Making me drop to the command line (where I cannot get root by the way, everything has to be prefaced with sudo) in the very begging of the install because you already can't handle my system does not instill confidence in me that you are the distro for me for ease of use. Yes Gentoo makes me use the command line for the install, but that's how it's supposed to be. It's supported and not a kludge/hack around for a ridiculous bug.

So I'm going to go and take the installer refusing to install on my laptop as a 'sign' (forceful 'eh?) that Ubuntu isn't for me and I should stick with Gentoo.

Next up: How easy can a Gentoo install be and how fast?