Written by Alan Pope the 28 Feb 08 at 15:11. Category: Installation.
Related to: Nothing/Others.
New
At the moment the live CD allows you to manage the creation of partitions yourself before you install, or choose "everything in one partition". The alternate CD also has similar features, but also has the option of using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to make post-install partition management easier, and MD (Multi-Disk) to do software RAID based installs.
These (LVM & MD) should be incorporated into the live installer (Ubiquity) and further there should be an easy option for having a separate root (/) and home (/home) partition on installation.
There are a few significant benefits to this, not least of which is the ability to easily reinstall the OS (or install a different derivative or even different distro) without losing the valuable data in /home.
Other benefits include resilience (from MD), easy partition resizing (from LVM), and better space management, making it so that a full /home partition does not affect the system as a whole (as / would not be full).