Is there no better solution than to say "Change your BIOS settings"? There is nothing to put the idea in the user's mind that that may be the problem, especially these days when many users have never seen a floppy disk in their lives.
blkid will make gparted lock up for 20 minutes or more, other commands fail much more quickly. Because gparted calls blkid, one never sees any output from blkid when it is causing gparted to seem to hang. This means people installing Linux for the first time think the installer does not work and they are likely to go away and not come back saying "Linux won't work on this PC". A PC that likely has a functioning Windows on it. At the very least there needs to be some sort of clue to the user, for example, programs that rely on blkid checking to see if it takes ages to respond and then informing the user the BIOS might need changing to match the actual drives installed, and the "System Requirements" documents for the various distributions changed to say "make sure your BIOS matches your installed drives because there is one time where it will cause your PC to hang which is when you install Linux". As it stands, this problem is an example of "Linux is too hard to use". It actually took me over 20 hours of determined struggling to finally work out why I could not seem to install Linux on my laptop, despite trying many distros, and to work out it was this blkid / gparted problem. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Touch seeded packages, which is subscribed to util-linux in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1044111 Title: blkid is hanging on probing nonexistant floppy drive Status in util-linux package in Ubuntu: Invalid Bug description: 1. Lubuntu 12.10 i386 3.5.0-11-generic 2. util-linux 2.20.1-5.1ubuntu1 3. I expected sudo blkid to display partition stats. This bug is reference to bug #1029149 gparted never completing scanning all devices. 4. I do not get the desired output from gparted or sudo blkid. The attached screenshot show the lack of results when using the sudo blkid command. ProblemType: Bug DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10 Package: util-linux 2.20.1-5.1ubuntu1 ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-11.11-generic 3.5.2 Uname: Linux 3.5.0-11-generic i686 ApportVersion: 2.5.1-0ubuntu2 Architecture: i386 Date: Thu Aug 30 18:33:46 2012 InstallationMedia: Lubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Alpha i386 (20120826) ProcEnviron: LANGUAGE=en_US:en PATH=(custom, no user) LANG=en_US.UTF-8 SHELL=/bin/bash SourcePackage: util-linux UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util-linux/+bug/1044111/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~touch-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
