No option to change an existing partition filesystem to ReiserFS in the new Espresso installer

Which distribution were you installing - Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, or Xubuntu? In Ubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu, reiserfs is definitely offered - you just have to delete the filesystem and create a new one, which is a bit odd, but there you go. I don't have Kubuntu to hand to check.

It is a Kubuntu distribution. I think that I tried to do that, but again
ReiserFS was not in the ComboBox.

Colin Watson wrote:

>Which distribution were you installing - Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, or
>Xubuntu? In Ubuntu/Edubuntu/Xubuntu, reiserfs is definitely offered -
>you just have to delete the filesystem and create a new one, which is a
>bit odd, but there you go. I don't have Kubuntu to hand to check.
>
>** Changed in: ubiquity (Ubuntu)
> Status: Unconfirmed => Needs Info
>
>
>

Jonathan, I figure this one's yours.

 I found this lines in
"ubiquity/d-i/source/partman-reiserfs/commit.d/format_reiserfs":

        status=failed
# libreiserfs has not yet been packaged as udeb so the following will fail
         name_progress_bar $template
         open_dialog CREATE_FILE_SYSTEM $id reiserfs
         read_line status
         close_dialog
        sync
        if [ "$status" != OK ]; then
....

Could it be that as the formatting of reiserfs partitions is still not
supported in this version (I have checked 0.99.74 source code) the combo
box does not show the ReiserFS option?

Colin Watson escribió:
> Jonathan, I figure this one's yours.
>
> ** Changed in: ubiquity (Ubuntu)
> Sourcepackagename: ubiquity => qtparted
> Status: Needs Info => Unconfirmed
>
>

No. Firstly, that code (unfortunately) has no influence on the combo box displayed to you; secondly, if you read about ten lines further down in that script you'll find code that falls back from parted to mkfs.reiserfs. That code works, because it's used in Ubuntu and reiserfs works there; this seems like purely a UI issue in qtparted.

i've experienced a similar problem when installing kubuntu from flight 7 live CD. qtParted would not let me select reiserfs but when i went to the next step of install (setting mount points) it said it was going to format '/' as reiserfs.

I just got a new machine, and I have the same problem. This is the 6.06 install CD, and it will not let me format using reiserfs.

Pretty serious bug, IMHO.

I am also a user of ReiserFS that is very disappointed at the state of the installer regarding ReiserFS. In Dapper, it was possible to workaround it by creating the partitions by hand. In Edgy that is not even possible (it would complaint about not having a root filesystem even when there's a defined root filesystem, only that it is an already created and formated ReiserFS).
I had to install with the alternate CD, that worked.
I've found this bugs to be related (maybe all the same bug: support ReiserFS please): 42994, 44566, 49826.
Thank you.

Marked Bug #49826 as duplicate of this bug.

My most recent notes from that bug report:

This has carried on through to Edgy although thankfully the text based installer still is capable installing with a full selection of file systems.
incidentally Reiserfs should be added as it appears to be the second most popular file system according to this recent pole: http://linux.inet.hr/poll_filesystem.html

Marked Bug #44566 as duplicate of this bug.

Moving to confirmed as a multiple users are interested in seeing a resolution.

This is *not* a ubiquity bug. Please do not reopen this bug on ubiquity. The problem is that qtparted only knows how to offer reiserfs with the aid of libreiserfs, which is too broken to use and therefore disabled (it creates reiserfs filesystems that later cause the kernel to oops). gparted uses an external program (mkfs.reiserfs) to do this, which works much better.

José mentions the "no root file system" bug, which is bug 67130. That makes the impact of this bug greater, but it's very much a separate bug, so please don't conflate the two.

I'm sure a patch for qtparted to make it able to use mkfs.reiserfs if libreiserfs is disabled would be welcome. It's not a matter of filesystem popularity - qtparted just isn't maintained upstream from what I hear, and I don't have the Qt skill or time to deal with it.

QtParted is unmaintained, so this will likely not be fixed. Ubiquity doesn't use it anymore anyway. :)

Er, oops.

There we go.