I'll toss my 2 cents in here as well. Part of testing is to test out the
installer. However, if your afraid of losing data (and you should have a
plan!), one trick I like to use is to simply crack open my case and
disconnect the hard drive(s) containing my crucial data. Boom, problem
solved. No way is the installer going to nuke me now :-) If you only
have one disk, then this isn't an option for you. But I like to have
separate physical disks for testing for this reason. For example, if I
had a two disk setup I would do this:
Disk 1:
Partition into as many slots as you'd like, using any partition on the
disk as the root filesystem
Ubuntu 10.04|Ubuntu12.04|Ubuntu12.10
Disk 2:
your home folder.. the entire disk, one partition, guard with your life
and have backups :-)
Now when installing, disconnect disk 2. Do whatever you'd like on disk
1, and if for some reason the installer wipes the disk and kills my
ubuntu 10.04 and ubuntu 12.04 partitions, I can report the bug and not
lose any sleep over it. Re-installing takes 20 mins. Re-attach my home
drive to it and re-sync my installed packages and I'm back in business.
Naturally after installing, you could decide if you wanted to mount disk
2 as /home on any of the root filesystems.. it would be your choice :-)
Thanks,
Nicholas
P.S. Ohh, btw, this applies to the stable releases too :-) Things can,
will and do break at any time. If your messing with a disk that has
important data (aka partitioning, installing grub, installing an OS),
you better have a impenetrable backup.
On 08/21/2012 02:53 PM, Dražen wrote:
OK, thanks everybody for your quick suggestions!
I think what Bryce and Andrea are suggesting would be what I had in
mind (using lxc containers would still prevent me from testing the
latest drivers).
I'll try it out and add it to the mentioned wiki page as another
method if it works.
Dražen
On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 7:51 PM, Andrea Corbellini
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 19/08/12 20:36, Dražen wrote:
Hi all,
is there a way to run the development Ubuntu version dual
boot, but by
using the OS installer (and other related stuff) from the
stable version
so that there is little or no chance of it damaging other
partitions
with the stable production installation?
I'd like to run an Ubuntu+1 version for development and testing
purposes. Now, I prefer having a dual boot installation to
VMs, because
of the ability to test on actual drivers (which are often the
cause of
why I want to hack something in the first place). After
reading the
description of this method on the wiki page
(https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UsingDevelopmentReleases/OtherWays)
it seems it
has a major drawback because a bug inside the installer (or, I
guess,
parts of the OS related to mounting other partitions etc.)
could cause
the loss of data on the production installation, which is quite
unacceptable even with backups, as it takes a lot of time to
recover and
get the system back to a usable state (especially if you have
other OSs
alongside Ubuntu).
What I'm wondering is if there is a way to run a development
version,
but with certain crucial parts that could tamper with other
partitions
taken from a stable release, where there is a higher level of
confidence
that it won't cause data loss on other partitions. This would
in an
essence be a sort of Ubuntu+1 installation sandboxed inside a
single
partition.
You can do this:
1. create the target partition and mount it somewhere;
2. use debootstrap(8) like this: `debootstrap quantal /somewhere';
3. chroot into the /somewhere and install the tasksel package;
4. run `tasksel install ubuntu-desktop';
5. update grub's configuration as you like.
This is basically what the Ubuntu installer does. You'll get a
perfectly functioning Ubuntu Desktop without running the live cd.
If something like this doesn't exist, would it be very
complicated to
create as, for example, an automatically generated remix? I
think it
would encourage many people to try out the development version
on their
own machines, detecting driver-related errors (which get
masked by using
VMs) much sooner. Also, it would allow developers to run a
development
version straight on their bare metal production machine, which
would be
a performance boost during their work.
Dražen Luc(anin
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