@ukbrian
I think you could tweak the installer to install without formatting and without wiping out the existing /home by doing the following:
1. Comment out lines 646 and 647 in refractainstaller-gui
Those lines look like this:
- Code: Select all
mke2fs -t $fs_type_os "$install_part" ; check_exit
tune2fs -r 10000 "$install_part" ; check_exit
2. add "- /home" to the excludes file (/usr/lib/refractainstaller/installer_exclude.list)
CAVEAT: It's possible I'm missing something important here, and I haven't tested it. Please don't test it on a system you care about. And please let me know if it works or not. I see from one of the threads you linked that at least one other person wants to do the same thing. Thanks.
Disk Labels: Changing the installer to accommodate disk labels won't happen soon, and it may not happen at all. It's a simple task for a human to edit fstab for disk labels and get it right. It's so easy to make the script discern what you want and do it right.
Screen width: Seems to be a black art with zenity. Sometimes they do what I want, and sometimes they don't. I played with them until they looked right to me. If you're saying it should be double, then I think I need to see a screen shot.
Version problem with dependencies: I just listed the versions that are in debian squeeze. Both the installer and the snapshot tool probably will work with older versions, but I can't be sure without testing. If I remove the version numbers in the control file, it might work ok with lots of other versions, and it might not. My first thought is that it might be possible to edit the control file inside the .deb before installing it. A more reliable way to get around this problem would be to copy the files into place manually, but then the package manager won't know about it.
Using these tools on other distros: This was not my main focus, but it seems like a reasonable task for the future. Maybe we could start a sticky post for people to record the results of any attempts to use the tools with other distros.