Report a problem with the installer

Important:
This documentation has been moved and is now being maintained as part of the Ubuntu Installer documentation. For the up-to-date version of this content, please refer to this version instead .

We always hope, of course, that every install with the server installer succeeds. But reality doesn’t always work that way and there will sometimes be failures of various kinds. This section explains the most useful way to report any failures so that we can fix the bugs causing them, and we’ll keep the topic up to date as the installer changes.

The first thing to do is to update your Subiquity snap. Not only because we fix issues that cause failures over time but also because we’ve been working on features to make failure reporting easier.

A failure will result in a crash report being generated which bundles up all the information we need to fully diagnose a failure. These live in /var/crash in the installer environment, and for Ubuntu 19.10 and newer this is persisted to the install media by default (if there is space).

When an error occurs you are presented with a dialog that allows you to upload the report to the error tracker and offers options for continuing. Uploads to the error tracker are non-interactive and anonymous, so they are useful for tracking which kinds of errors are affecting most users, but they do not give us a way to ask you to help diagnose the failure.

You can create a Launchpad bug report, which does let us establish this kind of two way communication, based on the contents of a crash report by using the standard apport-cli tool that is part of Ubuntu. Copy the crash report to another system, run:

apport-cli /path/to/report.crash

and follow the prompts.

You can also run apport-cli in the installer environment by switching to a shell but apport won’t be able to open a browser to allow you to complete the report so you’ll have to type the URL by hand on another machine.

3 Likes

Thanks Michael! Are you intending to add this to the server guide as a topic as well?

2 Likes

Nice! I think this is a pretty concise way of telling people how to do this. Maybe some of the Wiki should be updated in this format haha!
I think that I agree where powersj is going with his reply: possibly integrate this into the server guide, as well as posting it here!

dps

Hm, yes I guess that would be good. I was wondering about incorporating a link to this topic (or more likely a shortened version of the link) into the server installer directly. Linking to the server guide would probably make more sense. Getting up to speed with the new process has been something I’ve been failing to get around to for a while now.

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Please see this.

I have a need to report bugs against the installer. No crash, hence no apport-cli (“No pending crash reports”). When writing bug reports manually at launchpad, it would be helpful to include the package name … but what is the package name for the “ubuntu server installer”? Tried several searches, and got nothing.

A nice addition to this page would be the name of the package!

Subiquity is the installer for Ubuntu Server: https://github.com/canonical/subiquity
They track bugs in Launchpad at https://bugs.launchpad.net/subiquity.