• Registered: 2008-11-25
  • Posts: 4,363

Topic: Use of UUID's

When I was a mint user there used to be much discussion about Ubuntu's use of UUID's. So much so that a wiki article was created to show how not to use UUID's at all.

http://linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/UUI … _a_problem

I'm just curious as to what our communities views are on the topic.

  • From: NYC
  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 65

Re: Use of UUID's

Heh--one more of my pet peeves.  smile 

While it may have some minor benefit (I never really looked deeply into it), it can cause problems with, for example, sharing a swap partition between two distros. 

If you have something that works (I'm making up these statistics of course) for 99 percent of the people, and change to something that causes problems for even 5 percent then it's a regression, with little practical benefit, causing practical problems--yet another idea that's good in theory but turns out to be not that great in practice. 

They should have spent the effort in getting some basic things like networking and sound to work properly--oh wait, they had both of those, but broke them with the theoretical improvements in NetworkManager and of course, everyone's favorite, pulseaudio.

scottro's Website

  • From: NYC
  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 65

Re: Use of UUID's

Oops, after that last bit where it might have seemed I was being nasty about openbox, let me make sure that it's clear--my sarcasm in the above post was not aimed at corenominal, who had the good sense to leave out pulse audio.  It was aimed at the upstream developers with solutions in search of problems.

As for NM issues, that is an upstream thing--I think it's either been fixed in Fedora or is about to be.  Dinosaur that I am, though, I don't use it.

scottro's Website

  • Registered: 2008-12-13
  • Posts: 361

Re: Use of UUID's

omns wrote:

I'm just curious as to what our communities views are on the topic.

Nice if the filesystem moves around device-wise (usb is a major pain in the ass in this regard), for core FS, it's not really needed imho.

Nik_Doof's Website

  • From: SP, Brasil
  • Registered: 2008-12-01
  • Posts: 115

Re: Use of UUID's

I dont understand a bit about this kind of things.

I've always thought it would be a lot better to use uuid, especially when I have to take and install new hard disks. Later I've been just mouting disks with /dev/sdxy  (x the letter, y number) 'cuz Im extremely lazy for this now =\

  • From: Belgium
  • Registered: 2008-12-09
  • Posts: 27

Re: Use of UUID's

I'm with razienwolf on this one,
UUID it a good concept but the way it's calculate is not as logical as the /dev/SDx numbering.
for some reason it still seem much easier to give terminal commands based on /dev/sdX rather than a really long string of number aren't easy to remember.
Plus it make me feel poweless in hacking the grub menu when uuid are used..
I use /dev/Sdxx to mount
but i don't mind automouting with uuid.
Well it's not really an opinion, i'm  just thinking out loud smile

Last edited by djakku (2008-12-20 03:13:30)

eeepc-901 crunchbang with eeepc-kernel 2.6.27-8-eeepc
  • Registered: 2008-12-17
  • Posts: 7

Re: Use of UUID's

This is an annoying thing for me too, I don't like how Ubuntu in an effort to make things easy and user-friendly sometimes throws robustness away for only marginal usability improvements. Not that i'm dissing Ubuntu but... stuff like this annoys me sad

  • ghoti
  • #! Member
  • Offline
  • From: Twilight Zone
  • Registered: 2008-11-30
  • Posts: 61

Re: Use of UUID's

Thanks for the LinuxMint link you provided on UUID. Personally, I prefer the simplicity and transparency of using /dev/sdxx or /dev/hdxx. Simple, clear, and to the point, raher than relying on some obscure mathematical formula that calulate some magic number that you input somewhere else, with the hope that it is the correct number.

I have had some issues with using UUID on Archlinux (this is not just a Ubuntu issue): after I resized/partition some drives, I could not have access to the swap partition anymore, though it was resonably easy to solve by regenerating the UUID with the 'sudo blkid' command. But it can get worst, as described in this quote from that link:

So if you change a partition and/or change other partitions the UUID changes too. Then when you try to boot it fails - your (root) partition has got a new name (new UUID) but neither /boot/grub/menu.lst or /etc/fstab has changed. In essence you try to use a non existent drive!

Ghoti cool

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