The installation program on Ubuntu desktop is pretty basic. It lacks the other features, like support for LVM, RAID, and full disk encryption, that the Ubuntu text installer edition has. By default, it creates just one partition onto which it installs everything. If you want to install Ubuntu on a disk with separate partitions for the major file systems, you will have to partition the disk manually.

This tutorial presents a step by step guide on how to partition a hard disk manually for installing Ubuntu 10.10.