I have a system I have been building to serve as a browser kiosk. It came with Windows 11 Pro installed. I successfully installed Ubuntu Desktop 24.04.1 in a dual boot configuration using the Ubuntu installer and the system was presenting a Grub menu that defaulted to booting Ubuntu but also allowed me to select to boot Windows.
After spending some time working with various guides on setting up a browser kiosk, I found some Ubuntu Frame documentation titled Make a Secure Ubuntu Web Kiosk and decided to give it a try.
I followed the Ubuntu Core install with dd documentation and naively overwrote the nvme0n1p6 ext4 partition with the latest Ubuntu Core image thinking that grub was elsewhere and was probably going to be OK since it would also be Ubuntu on the same partition. Obviously I was wrong because when I rebooted I found myself at a grub> prompt. Thinking on it now the Ubuntu Core image is probably a whole disk image including its own partition table.
I would like to restore the ability to dual boot but with Ubuntu Core as the default and Windows 11 as an alternative menu option.
Relevant System Information:
Dell Optiplex 7020 with 512GB NVMe storage. UEFI.
Screenshots or Error Messages:
What I’ve Tried:
I have tried booting an Ubuntu 24.04.2 Desktop ISO in “Try Ubuntu” mode, installing boot-repair, and generated this pastebin content. It did not have a recommended fix for me to apply.
This is not possible, UbuntuCore is not designed for dual booting but normally runs on dedicated devices (imagine the screens showing ads and menus behind the counter of your favorite burger supplier, a medical device, a controller for a ten ton press or for a turbine in a nuclear power plant… etc etc)
The image is also not designed to be written to a partition of a disk but is a complete disk image with its own bootloader, in your setup you would normally write it to nvme0n1 (but indeed would also overwrite windows in that process)
To do what you want I would recommend simply using an Ubuntu server install with the rootfs in nvme0n1p6, then install the ubuntu-frame and wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk snaps and you will have the exact same thing but with dual booting and a classic install underneath
Thank you very much for that. The kiosk system I am building is for deployment in what is essentially a remote public museum exhibit but I did not want to do away with the Windows partition because in my experience certain hardware/firmware update utilities are Windows only and I thought it would be easy enough to keep it dormant in there for any future onsite hardware maintenance that needed it.
I imagine it would be possible to get Ubuntu Core onto a system with dual boot, but I take your point that it would probably be outside the thinking of the Ubuntu Core product team and be more trouble than it is worth at this point. I will install Ubuntu Server and build from there as you suggest.
That would be rather non-trivial, UbuntuCore is self-healing, so if a kernel OOPSes the bootloader detects it and automatically rolls you back to the working one (that’s an essential product feature implemented on a very low level), to make that not explode in a dual boot scenario a lot of changes in the existing design would be needed…
I don’t configure the system to reboot immediately but rather at a specific time. And I didn’t specifically enable livepatch, I just subscribed the system to Pro which enables it by default.
If unattended-upgrades and livepatch should not be enabled at the same time, someone should really document that because it seems like the default setup for a lot of people who want their systems to update themselves and who also subscribe to Pro for similar reasons.
Well, the main purpose of livepatch is that you do not need to reboot and still get CVE fixes for the kernel at runtime (you should still reboot eventually to not have livepatches pile up forever, but way way less)
To work around the bug you should disable either of the two, a regular forced reboot really defeats the purpose of livepatch, you should be able to disable it with sudo pro disable livepatch if you want to keep the rebooting in place…
Thanks. I can see some value in livepatch and unattended-upgrades coexisting so I’ll keep an eye on the bug but do the workaround you suggest and disable livepatch on about 50 VMs while I wait. I might also up the frequency for unattended upgrades though if I can’t count on livepatch for quick kernel updates. Anyway, we digress.
I have Ubuntu Server and Windows 11 both appearing in my Grub2 boot menu now. It wasn’t as simple as when I installed Ubuntu Desktop (which notices Windows and offers to configure for dual boot) but it wasn’t too bad to fix.
As for Ubuntu Frame and a web kiosk, I have created a new thread for that. I did get it running with some extra hunting, but am on to a new issue of trying to run firefox or chromium rather than wpe-webkit-mir-kiosk. Please hop over there if you can help!
