Bug 121698

Supporting an additional partiton table type is lot of work. It involves
changing YaST2 and probably fixing bugs in parted too.
I have no one idea about amiga partition table so I certainly cannot do that.

Parted seems so work fine, less than 5 minutes to fully partiton a new disk, and
I never knew anything about parted or Amiga partition table at all. I was able
to create a partition table with just a simple "mklabel amiga" and then create
partitions with mkpart.
The only difference from the PC partition table seems to be the lack of extended
partition. Right now I have 7 partitions, but I can test, what the maximum is,
if you want.

So it is not really a problem for someone with such a partition table
to do his partitioning outside of YaST2 and use existing partitions during
installation. 
No idea what the bootloader do with an amiga partitition table.

Yes, it works fine, and is documented at http://www.opensuse.org/PPC:Boot_pegasos
But for novice users (I use Linux 10+ years) it would be difficult to use
parted, and are afraid of 'Expert' partitioning.

Booting is a seperate issue. On a Pegasos, the first partition needs to be an
ext2 or ext3 partition (these are supported by the firmware). This has a file,
called 'menu' written in forth, which has easy and straightforward menuentries.
Or a kernel be directly booted from the firmware from any ext2/ext3 partitions,
and then no 'menu' or seperate first partition is needed . This means that no
bootloader should be installed from YaST, only a kernel prepared as described on
the openSUSE wiki. Booting is very well documented in Pegasos documentation.

An ODW (a computer built around the Pegasos2 mainboard) is available at Matthias
Fruhauf, if you could take a closer look.

Please take a look at http://www.ppczone.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=419

If partitioning a HDD with an Amiga partition table is not supported, please at least warn the user about it.
YaST should detect, if there is already an Amiga partition table on the HDD, and if so, then print a warning message like this:

"An _Amiga_ partition table was detected on $hdd_device_name . YaST does not support writing/modifying it. You can use currently available partitions using the expert partitioner (it can also format existing partitions). If you change any partitions, YaST will write an _MSDOS_ partition table, and all of your current data on that HDD will be lost"

# parted /dev/hda print
Disk geometry for /dev/hda: 0kB - 40GB
Disk label type: amiga
Number  Start   End     Size    File system  Name                  Flags
1       8225kB  1078MB  1069MB  ext2         boot
2       1078MB  2147MB  1069MB  linux-swap   swap
3       2147MB  12GB    9656MB  reiserfs     susea
4       12GB    21GB    9656MB  ext3         suse
5       21GB    31GB    9656MB  ext3         gentoo
Information: Don't forget to update /etc/fstab, if necessary.

so a quick check of: parted /dev/hda print | grep label | grep amiga  would be sufficent to see, if amiga partitioning is there.

BTW: http://www.ppczone.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=410
MSDOS partitioning is not supported, but it "works for me".

In case the partition table type is unsupported by YaST2 we now show a
popup with an explanation and set the partition table to readonly (so
that the partitions can be used, e.g. formated, but no partitions can
be created, removed, resized, ...).

I could not see any popup or explanation in Alpha3. I still have the above mentioned partiton table on my Pegasos.

Please provide the YaST2 logs of the Alpha3 installation (or installation
try).

Created attachment 58326 [details]
YaST2 logs

From the logs I can see that the amiga partition was detected and
the popup called.  Maybe the callbacks for popups aren't installed
at that time - I will check that.

Instead of a popup, a big, fat, red warning message should be on the summary page, just as with package selection or boot manager problems. That does not require any new technology, and does not go away with just a click.

It's even in the logs: The callbacks are installed too late.

And the popup isn't new technology.  There are already other popups.

But popups disappear with one click of the mouse. The red text on the installation screen stays there, and annoys the user to read it carefully and understand it.

Popuo should be visiable with SL10.1 beta#1.

Additonally the disk is marked "readonly" which prevents the user from
inadevertently creating, deleting and resizing partitions but allows 
formatting of existing partitions.

Popup is annoying. It shows up not only before the partitioner starts, but also for "software management", where one can't change partitions at all.

You are right, will see if I can show it at a more appropriate place and suppress
it for other YaST2 parts that need partition information.

Should be better in beta#2.
- Will only show during installation and when calling "yast2 disk"
- Popup will come later than before.