Most people I know who are familiar with VMs, have used mini.iso for years and years…
There is no point in a full desktop install in a VM - just enough to get the job done.
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mini iso for 20.04 now deprecated?
Ubuntu offers boot-in-place cloud images for this use case, which is generally a better experience than having to boot an installer at all. You might want to give them a try. https://ubuntu.com/download/cloud
Thanks for the link to the focal mini.iso. It’s well hidden while it was easy to found on previous ubuntu release.
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Ubuntu offers boot-in-place cloud images for this use case, which is generally a better experience than having to boot an installer at all.
And what about the use case for a minimal install on bare metal, or those that want to do their own installations instead of using a pre-installed cloud image? The mini.iso you have linked to pre-dates the 20.04 release date!
The assumption seems to be that everyone either wants (a) a full blown install with Subiquity or (b) to run a pre-installed image in a VM. Not everyone fits into those two categories!
I am rather surprised that what must be a very common use case (minimal server installs) is now dropped (from d-i), unimplemented (subiquity), unsupported (mini.iso), and undocumented (all)!
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I note also that the information here seems to conflict the documentation here:
Note that it refers to three installation types (and the corresponding memory requirements):
Server (Standard), 512 megabytes
live server, 1 gigabyte
Server (Minimal), 384 megabytes
But the instructions which follow are only in relation to live server. How does one perform the other two types of installation?
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You are correct that the docs are out of date. We need to finish updating them.
The server guide, prior to Focal was grossly out of date. Some pages had not been touched since Precise. We have hit some of the other pages, but some other pages like the install area are still needing re-writes.
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I don’t think the concern he was trying to express is that the documentation is out of date. In fact, the section he quoted was pretty current and up-to-date up until a week ago!
The problem is that the senior management at Canonical seems totally out-of-touch with what your users want and is trying to force something down their throat that just doesn’t fulfill their needs. You seem to believe that a typical server user wants guided disk partitioning during installs and installing to existing disk partitions/volumes is a fringe use-case that can be safely ignored.
The documentation is merely reflective of how well ubuntu server fulfilled wide range of user requirements (even supporting older low-memory systems) by providing several options for the installation. But with this release, you have decided to take away what a significant chunk of your user base has been actively using (both the traditional d-i install and the mini.iso/netboot based minimal server install) and are offering an alternative that just doesn’t fill the huge gap you’ve created. And your solution to fix this problem is to update the documentation to erase any references to d-i!
The live installer has been out there for a couple years and perhaps the lack of complaints made you believe it’s widely accepted. But the fact is that it’s severely limited in functionality compared to d-i and is also horribly broken. It wasn’t quite ready to be the default installer for a major LTE release!
A plenty of server users haven’t looked past mini.iso for years and didn’t even know that live installer existed - so it didn’t matter to them up until now. D-i just worked and allowed most of your users to do what they wanted.
It’s quite obvious that subiquity can’t match the functionality and simplicity of the debian-installer because of the way it’s designed. But on the other hand, the redesign will definitely bring out some benefits over d-i. So why not keep both?
Someone from your staff commented that d-i/mini.iso hasn’t even been officially supported for a long time, so it’s not like it’s being actively developed. If it still works, what’s the point of killing it if there are no alternatives that perform the same function and there’s clearly a demand?
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I always used d-i to install my HTPC system
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Please keep the mini.iso in a well maintained state and at a visible path without ‘archive’ and ‘legacy’ in the URL.
It serves a lot of purposes both for desktop and server users.
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Hi, I found a problem in the new ubuntu 20.04 LTS installer via netinstall.
When installing and selecting only the SSH server, the distribution installs correctly, but after booting from the disk the default terminal is tty7 (thus only the black screen is shown).
Switching the ALT + F1 terminal to tty1 solves the problem and shows a normal login prompt.
When installing from a normal ISO image I did not encounter this problem.
It is a bit disturbing because it is not known what happens during startup and whether the server turned on correctly.
The difference I found is in the setting
/etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
netinstall has:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "splash quiet"
system with normal iso:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "maybe-ubiquity"
After changing and rebuilding the grub config next boot normally loads login prompts.
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Lot of rancor in this thread, which seems to have devolved into a bunch of rock-throwing and me-too posts. Freezing the thread briefly to get discussion back on track.
Advice to new folks:
- Please use the appropriate thread tools instead of me-too posts.
- Please avoid posting in the heat of the moment. Let your post cool a bit before hitting ‘Send’.
- Don’t throw rocks. Violators of the Code of Conduct will be suspended.
It was already the default installer in Ubuntu 18.04. So this is the second LTS release where it is the default, and this thread was created to gather input from users about what features it would need to gain in order to completely obsolete the non-default d-i-based installer. I’m sorry this didn’t come to your attention until after the 20.04 LTS release has happened, but it’s quite difficult to reach all Ubuntu users who might be affected by deprecation of a component. This is effectively why the d-i images have been kept in place as legacy images for 20.04.0 LTS, so that users have a solution for use cases that were not captured for the 20.04 release of the live installer. It is also why the path of these images has been changed, so that users know that there are changes happening and can plan for the future.
Bug #1429030 “netboot mini.iso doesn't support UEFI boot” : Bugs : debian-installer package : Ubuntu shows that the mini.iso does not work on any system running in UEFI mode instead of in BIOS mode. That means it is only usable on an ever-diminishing percentage of older server hardware.
I understand that you find the mini.iso better suited to your needs. But I don’t think it helps for you to assert that it meets the needs of “most of [Ubuntu’s] users”.
It’s been a day for folks to cool down. Reopening…
My solution:
in /etc/default/grub set GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT = "**no**splash ...
update-grub
apt -y purge plymouth-theme-ubuntu-text
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Please listen when we say that the Ubuntu mini.iso is useful both for server users and for desktop users.
Many people like the flexibility of the debian installer. And many people are still using computers that run well in BIOS mode (alias CSM alias legacy mode), where systems made with the mini.iso work.
More people than you think want to create a system with a light-weight desktop environment or window manager and install a custom set of application programs. The Ubuntu mini.iso in an excellent tool for this purpose.
So please keep it alive and easily available to end users.
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It looks like the solution described does not work on machines with just 2Gb of RAM: the kernel loads and when it tries to download and mount the iso it fails with the initramfs wget: short write: No space left on device error message (after downloading 660Mb)
ramdisk_size=1500000 option in the append section did not change anything 
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Right, it also needed root=/dev/ram0, and now right before it installs grub into a freshly installed ubuntu 20.04 it crashes in the curtin which I reported at https://bugs.launchpad.net/curtin/+bug/1876258