Poll about possible netboot mini.iso revival in future Ubuntu releases

As you are may already know I’m very disappointed about netboot mini.iso removal from Ubuntu 20.10 and (possible) upcoming releases.

So I decided to ask community about their experience with mini.iso.
Maybe I’m wrong and simply should forget about the fact that Ubuntu is the best derivative of Debian and other great facts about positive Ubuntu history.

You use netboot mini.iso to install:

  • system from the smallest <100 Mb install media
  • on old systems with CD/DVD-only boot
  • on old systems which recognize only small USB devices
  • using with PXE boot
  • on hardware RAID, software RAID, iSCSI volumes
  • using custom partitioning scheme (LVM, encrypted LVM, full custom)
  • really minimal system
  • using proxy on the earliest stage
  • the system without Snaps
  • the system without cloud-init
  • the system with carefully chosen deb-package set (like meta-packages for desktops and servers)
  • to avoid removal of unneeded packages after installation
  • under special conditions with limited hardware resources on RAM, disk and video (like QEMU on Android Termux, qemu-system-i386/x86_64 on ARM64, old versions of VirtualBox)
  • to rescue installed system using rescue mode
  • to boot minimal system for doing manual recovery tasks
  • to use habital conventional way of installation to take the full control

0 voters

3 Likes

Can I ask what your goal is in running this poll? Several of the poll options you present explicitly result in configurations that are unsupported by the Ubuntu developers by diverging from the carefully curated defaults, and result in a significant number of bug reports to us about the resulting wrong behavior. These would be a reason to discontinue the mini.iso even if we were not discontinuing support for the debian-installer on which it’s based.

2 Likes

Jay,

I’m a bit confused by your posting and your reasoning for skipping an LTS, there is a 20.04 mini.iso.

For brevity: http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/focal/main/installer-amd64/current/legacy-images/netboot/mini.iso

3 Likes

I made account just to say that i really liked the mini.iso and im sad to see it gone…

1 Like

For our companies’ usecase, the mini.iso was perfect: easy PXE booting, small footprint image, no bloat.
Now this has been made unnecessary hard.

2 Likes