F6 "Other Options" menu puts kernel options in wrong place

Thank you for taking the time to make Ubuntu better. Since what you submitted is not really a bug, or a problem, but rather an idea to improve Ubuntu, you are invited to post your idea in Ubuntu Brainstorm at https://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ where it can be discussed, voted by the community and reviewed by developers. Thanks for taking the time to share your opinion!

Hmmm?!?? :s

The installer created an unbootable system. That's a bug IMHO.

Not only is it a bug, it is also a problem. The live-CD based installer has lots of helpful screens about which options you should choose if your system doesn't boot. Grub doesn't. This creates a problem for someone who can't remember "noapic nolapic acpi=off" in a character perfect manner.

Could this please be reviewed by somebody else?

Hi,
Sorry I didn't fully understand the first description. After re-reading it and the bit above it seems that it is a problem in ubiquity. Could you please attach /var/log/syslog and /var/log/partman to this bug, following the directions in http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingUbiquity/AttachingLogs? Thanks in advance.

Umm. As I said, this isn't my computer but a friend's. What are you looking for in those files? Isn't this an easy bug to nail: some bit of code somewhere needs to look at /proc/cmdline and Do The Right Thing. If that piece of code is missing then how are those files going to help? :s

Hi,
The syslog file shows a complete log of the user interaction with ubiquity (the LiveCD installer), therefore if any settings are not being saved by ubiquity we will see in the logs (hopefully) where it has gone wrong and should be able to determine from there how to proceed. The partman log shows if there was any problem with partitioning, as it is a friends machine we cannot rule out any possibilities.
Thank you.

I apologise that your bug report was dealt with by somebody apparently not very familiar with the installer. We do not in fact need any of the information that Teej asked for in order to fix this bug: the partman log would contain no useful information whatsoever, and the only thing that syslog would tell me would be the contents of /proc/cmdline. Fortunately, I can experiment with this for myself and make a good guess at the problem.

This is actually supposed to be supported already, provided that you put the boot options that are supposed to be preserved *after* the "--" that's at the end of the command line on the live CD. This allows us to distinguish boot options that are supposed to be passed only to the installer from ones that are expected to be preserved, and generally this scheme works well. Unfortunately, gfxboot-theme-ubuntu, which implements our CD boot menu, doesn't add its preset options (acpi=off etc.) to the end of the boot command line, but instead adds them to near the start. Fixing this would fix this bug.

This bug was fixed in the package gfxboot-theme-ubuntu - 0.7.2

---------------
gfxboot-theme-ubuntu (0.7.2) jaunty; urgency=low

  * Add options from the F6 "Other Options" menu after the per-menu-entry
    options rather than before (LP: #295949).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Tue, 10 Mar 2009 02:15:30 +0000