Wanted a quick up-to-date Ubuntu for my VM. Couldn’t find mini.iso. Found this thread.
Decided to take your advice. Downloaded OVA (big) and then fed it to VMware (slow).
Couldn’t log in. Searched and discovered I’d need a bunch of tools.
Went to debian.org, pressed big “download” button on front page (quick, fast) fed it to VMware (quick) answered a few prompts. Was up and running in 10 minutes.
Please consider whether you’re losing something valuable with all the layers upon layers you’re adding.
after years it turns out that it is actually easier to install Debian than Ubuntu. At least if one wants to perform custom install…
I wanted to install minimal Ubuntu 20.10 with openbox for my old laptop. I tried to be ambitious and follow instructions given here. As a plain user without any knowledge about networks, it took me many hours, and I didn’s even manage to start the installer.
Manual is very spare and one has to guess every single step:
first dnsmasq failed, I had to enable port 53
I had to allow this port in ufw (at least I think I had to)
from other site I discovered that correct catalogue for pxe.conf is /etc/dnsmasq.d and not /etc/dnsmasq.conf.d
from Debian wiki I’ve learned that I have to disable DHCP on my router
then my client got IP from my dnsmasq server, obtained files from tftp, but failed to connect to http://releases.ubuntu.com…
Despite all of this, my client wasn’t able to fetch .iso file, and at least for now, I gave up trying.
From conversation I see, that Ubuntu’s devs idea was to block such tries as mine, to perform minimal installation, and limit users to default system installation. IMO that hasn’t got much in common with open source spirit. I guess I need to wait few months for Debian Bullseye. Ubuntu as an alternative for Debian Testing turned out to be too hard. Strange times…
Yes, to be clear, this debian-installer “minimal installation” has never been supported by the Ubuntu developers and doing such an install is historically the source of many confusing bug reports.
We support installing Ubuntu Desktop, and Ubuntu Server; there are other community flavors that are supported by the developer community which have lower hardware requirements than Ubuntu Desktop, such as Lubuntu; but users installing a barebones bootstrap and picking and choosing which packages to install on top of this is unsupportable and unsupported, and we are not going to do work to specifically enable users deploying Ubuntu in this way.
The code is Open Source and you are free to make modifications to it. That does not mean Ubuntu needs to do work, or accept contributions, to enable users to shoot themselves in the foot.
Thanks for the reply, but mind, that there are users, who aren’t asking for help, but only to not being blocked. One of the things that I most like on Linux is possibility to pick the “bricks”, that I like and build my desktop. It allows me also to not throw my old hardware to garbage (ecology). Manual should be “For Human Beings” and not contain errors at least. As I’ve said- I’ve made an attempt only to learn something new, I could write this server ISO on USB and not bother. Whats more- I tried to treat Ubuntu as Debian testing alternative (on testing security updates must go through Sid, so it’s not adviseable to use it). Generally I think I don’t need fresh packages, so I will stick with Debian Stable. It probably won’t teach me much more, but we share common ideas at least. Think about it.
Cheers
Very strange official position.
So it was robots who prepared all previous netboot mini.iso images, right? Humans made mistakes while created all these mini.iso images for last 14 years, right?
Currently you are forcing users with strange limits. Many users still expect mini.iso to reborn!
@Norbert- it turns out that people like us, with such a strange needs like ours, aren’t considered “Human beings” by Canonical anymore. We have to live with it.
From time to time this company makes decisions like ditching Gnome for Unity, adding Amazon search etc., which I strongly dislike. Dislike to the point, that I moved to Debian years ago. It seemed that recently things got better, so I thought: “why not try Ubuntu as an alternative to testing?”.
For me this topic isn’t as much as for technical aspects- I can download 900 MB .iso, it doesn’t bother me as much. The thing is, Ubuntu could be so much better, if it only comply with, what I’ve called earlier “open source SPIRIT”- name it as you like.
The mini.iso artifact was inherited from Debian without modification and had never been dropped. It has never been QAed by the Ubuntu team as part of releases, is not documented, and has never been supported.
There are many things inherited from Debian that are not supported in Ubuntu. Switching your init system is not supported in Ubuntu but is supported in Debian. We’ve done work in Ubuntu so that the normal way of switching init systems in Ubuntu does not work. The error with mini.iso was in not removing it sooner.
The Ubuntu development team has never indicated that the debian-installer deprecation was subject to popular polling. I think it is unhelpful for the above thread to exist and give users false hope.
We are always happy to discuss use cases that Ubuntu could better address. But the mini.iso as it existed is not coming back, and providing an installer that lets users install an unsupported subset of packages is not a use case we’re going to implement support for.
Please, don’t read my words too directly, put them into brackets.
Sadly it seems that Ubuntu isn’t meant for people like me or maybe @Norbert too. If Ubuntu isn’t for us and it is for human beings, then we aren’t human beings (geeks maybe). Treat it as a joke, though.
Why it isn’t for someone like me? Because on regular manner it imposes certain things on me, that I don’t like. It was like that when Unity replaced Gnome (there wasn’t Gnome Remix already available), it is now, when after years it is announced, that the tool commonly used by many, turned out to be some kind of evil, that company hardly tolerated.
But please, don’t take it to yourself. It’s only my own opinion, and my personal taste, that I’d like Ubuntu better if it was more Debian-like, not less and less throughout the years.
Yes it is a preference, not only mine, it seems. But why company don’t want to meet our preference? Does it cost too much work for the team to create .mini.iso?
But I won’t fight for this preference with my hands and feets. I will just use distro that better suits my needs.
Does anyone have recommendations on how I can initiate an Ansible playbook during the autoinstall process or directly after? I have an unattended install of Ubuntu server working fine with a basic autoinstall.yaml script; however, I’m looking to keep that simple and do some of the more complex things in Ansible after the autoinstall process runs (or during if that’s what I need to do). I’m new to this and I haven’t found a good recipe that I should try and follow to do this yet.
So I got further on this. I am able to netboot the installation. But I am trying to use the autoinstall feature and it keeps dying. It will start the installer and then go directly to killed saying OOM. For testing purposes my VM is set up w/ 1 CPU and 2GB RAM on VMware. I can’t get logs but here is a screenshot of what i’m experiencing.
That looks like you are using the legacy installer. The url kernel parameter in the legacy installer is used for the preseed file. The url kernel parameter in the live installer is used for the iso image. It looks like the legacy installer is trying to use the iso image as a preseed file.
You should go back and review some guides. In particular, the information about getting the kernel and initram files from the live-server CD. You can not use the files from the legacy installer (whether the legacy iso, mini.iso, or the netboot archive).
Focus on the information about netbooting the live-server iso image. The steps are laid out in the first post of this topic. Once you have that working, then you can try to figure out autoinstall or cloud-init.
So I am I able to pxe boot to the ISO. It boots to the interactive text installer.
I have it set to this: append vga=normal initrd=networkboot/ubuntu/20.04/initrd.gz net.ifnames=0 biosdevname=0 root=/dev/ram0 ip=dhcp ipv6.disable=1 url=ftp://10.150.10.8/pub/iso/ubuntu-20.04.1-live-server-amd64.iso autoinstall ds=nocloud-net;s=ftp://10.150.10.8/pub/configs/
I have the 2 files needed. But the installer doesn’t seem to be picking them up.
I wish I could specify a kickstart file. Makes life soooo much easier!
The information you’ve provided doesn’t add up for me. However, I will assume you do have the live-installer ISO booting over the network, and assume the “2 files” are the user-data and meta-data files located in ftp://10.150.10.8/pub/configs/. My thoughts would be
I don’t know if the installer supports ftp URLs. I have not seen any examples using this protocol. I see some docs suggesting ftp is supported, but also this bug suggesting they are wrong.
Access a shell to check the subiquity logs in /var/log/installer. A shell can be opened either using the Help menu in the text installer or using the Alt-F2 terminal
Check the server logs to see if any requests for the files are being made
