Subiquity 23.04.2 has been released to the stable channel

Foundations
1

The primary theme for this release was productization fixes in support of Ubuntu Desktop Installer. This includes many partitioning enhancements, fixes to enable autoinstall for Ubuntu Desktop Installer, and improvements in handling of NetworkManager.

Another item is improvements in handling of Apt. Many Subiquity failure reports have the Subiquity-Apt interaction as the cause. We now more proactively check that the chosen mirror looks valid, offer autoinstall controls to allow the install to continue if the mirror cannot be contacted, and more. On similar note, a failure to complete unattended-upgrades is no longer fatal to the install.

On the subject of offline installs, there is a new fallback key to control the desired behavior when the Ubuntu archive mirror is unavailable during install time. The default policy is abort, which ends the install if the archive mirror is unaccessible. In some situations, it is acceptable to proceed with an offline install when the mirror is inaccessible. In this scenario, it is advised to use:

apt:
  fallback: offline-install

A common feature request is to adjust how LVM uses a full disk during guided storage creation. It is by design that the rootfs will not use all available VG space by default, to allow creation of further volumes after install, snapshot creation, and generally take advantage of LVM features. However, today LUKS encryption is only offered on LVM, so users desiring full disk encryption would be left with the rootfs not actually using the full disk, until a later expansion of the volume post install.

To this end an autoinstall policy has been added to optionally allow expanding the LVM rootfs LV to use the full disk. Ubuntu-desktop-installer has this expansion on by default, while Server retains the existing scaled usage. When installing via the Subiquity TUI mind that the size of the created volume may be adjusted on the confirmation page. Further improvements around disk encryption, guided installs, and volume handling are anticipated in upcoming releases.

On the subject of LVM, encrypted installs may now be autoinstalled. While we have taken care to not leak the password to the logs in this case, mind that transport of the autoinstall data may reveal the encrypted password. Please consider changing this LUKS passphrase after install is complete if you are taking advantage of autoinstall for a LUKS installation.

The keyboard screen has seen an improvement where the chosen language is used to select a different default keyboard layout.

Several documentation fixes and updates have been done. They are tracked in source code now, allowing for enforcing that future autoinstall changes have a matching autoinstall reference update.

Known issues:

  • If using autoinstall to configure network for Desktop images with Ubuntu Desktop Installer, mind that NetworkManager is in use, so configure with with renderer: NetworkManager.

The 23.04 Ubuntu Server ISOs have been built with Subiquity 23.04.1. The specific differences between 23.04.1 and 23.04.2 are:

  • LP: #2016280 (PR: 1659) - Fix an issue with Subiquity 23.04.1 on Ubuntu 20.04.x where apt fails to run due to library conflicts
  • LP: #2002413 (PR: 1652) - Fix a crash issue with Ubuntu Desktop Installer that could occur when editing a swap partition
  • (Probert PR: 133) - Fix issue with NTFS partitions where ntfsresize --info was showing progress output in the logs
  • LP: #2016901 (PR: 1660) - Fix an issue in Ubuntu Desktop Installer where manual partition edits could fail after certain udev events
  • LP: #2016858 (Curtin MP: 441347) - Fix issue where ntfsresize would not resize a NTFS partition that Ubiquity would due to differences in the arguments to ntfsresize.

Additional Bugfixes found in 23.04.1 and 23.04.2:

  • ubuntu-desktop-installer/issues/1772 (PR: 1636) - Fix an issue where the EFI System Partition could be formatted without the installer user choosing to do so.
  • LP: #2016901 (PR: 1660) - Fix issue where udev events could trigger queued partition changes being discarded, often leading to an install crash
  • LP: #1983036 (PR: 1386) - Fix an issue affecting Ubuntu Desktop Installer where a partition which should have been formatted was not
  • LP: #1989179 (PR: 1425) - Fix issue with “try again” when installing snaps to guarantee that snaps will be installed (was fixed previously, but not release noted before)
  • LP: #1990239, LP: #1992531 (PR: 1429, PR: 1449) - Fix a crash issue at the end of the install due to unmount conflicts
  • LP: #1998376 (PR: 1505) - Fix an issue where the wrong drivers were offered during install in Ubuntu Desktop Installer
  • LP: #2004659 (PR: 1569) - Fix an issue where the online state would not be detected correctly for Desktop images, or any other case with Network Manager.
  • LP: #2008271 (PR: 1578) - Fix an autoinstall issue where an incorrect keyboard layout value would fail late in the install. It now warns sooner with an Unknown keyboard ValueError.
  • LP: #2012722 (Curtin MP: 439863) - Fix an issue where, when using Ventoy, a block probing failure would be raised early in the install.
  • LP: #2015100 (Curtin MP: 440232) - Fix a disk lookup failure when the WWN value has a vendor extension
  • LP: #2013079 (PR: 1618) - Fix Active Directory domain joins when using Ubuntu Desktop Installer. (Domain Joins not supported yet in Subiquity TUI)
  • LP: #2015028 (PR: 1637) - Fix a crash that could occur with some keyboard layouts
  • LP: #2015521 (PR: 1641) - Fix a crash that occur when attempting to create a logical partition.
  • LP: #2002413 (PR: 1652) - Fix a crash when using Ubuntu Desktop Installer and configuring a swap partition.

Full Changelog:
https://github.com/canonical/subiquity/compare/23.02.1...23.04.2