The current Instalation Guide is fetauring the fdisk as a tool for partitioning hard drive. I propose to change that to cfdisk. Here are my arguments. While fdisk is a great and very powerful tool it is quite confusing for newbies (and not only them) to use. Being a command based tool it requires you to rememeber keys for various operations and also you have to remember your hard drive layout. cfdisk, on the other hand, is also very powerful, but is *much* easier to use. You are able to see all you partitions staright away after you load it and all the required operations are presented with buttons on the bottom of the screen. For a new user, who probably never partitioned hard disk before it would be much easier to use cfdisk, as it provides an interface everyone is used to - choose item and select action. Also there is a much smaller chance of missing something and removing wrong partition. As a final argument, I'd say that replacing fdisk with cfdisk would make the partitioning section of the guide smaller and less scary to novice users. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce:
See my -dev post for my comments on this.
For the interested, discussion can be followed online on http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/11311
not mentioned on gentoo-dev, but i like cfdisk because (oh no!) it looks like the ms fdisk guy ... it *is* a lot easier to use, fdisk confused the hell out of me ;)
There isn't a cfdisk that can handle Sun labels (needed to boot a disk on any Sun box), and I think that the same thing could happen for other archs a well. I prefer to have a similarity on the install docs of the diferent archs, than to have a not so good GUI.
On a PPC (Macs) we have only mac-fdisk and parted (yeah, it can handle HFS+ partitons now!). mac-fdisk is like fdisk, but with special commands for the special Apple partitions, that need to be generated. The idea of a "common" partitioning tool wouldn't become true. The only tool that works on quite every system is parted. It also has the ability to shrink partitions and make space for Gentoo Linux. But as far as I see it is still a bit unstable... That's the reason why every arch supports another partitioning tool. And for me it's okay we support fdisk as it is well described and does it's job.
With our extremely verbose instructions, most people are able to use it successfully. It's an important skill for advanced users to have. In over a year of helping out on #gentoo, I've noticed that people who have issues with figuring out fdisk while following the install guide are _very_ rare.
With the end of the fdisk/cfdisk discussion on gentoo-dev, may I - or svyatogor - mark this bug as LATER (i.e. when the handbook installation chapter is finished)? Then we can rediscuss all, or just add information on cfdisk.
As we haven't been able to reach a common opinion on this topic I'm marking this bug as LATER and will reopen it when time comes.
*** Bug 124397 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 129555 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Time to close
*** Bug 148076 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
