Ubuntu live server installer

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FocalFossa/ReleaseNotes#Installer
The live server installer is now the preferred media to install Ubuntu Server on all architectures.

Foreman has the change Bug #29612: Ubuntu 20 changed pxe files url - Foreman to change the code for the Ubuntu 20 changed PXE files URL.

And we have checked the legacy images folder in Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo)
The Legacy Ubuntu Server Installer is no longer available.

Any plan to support the new Ubuntu Server Installer? Thanks.

What exactly needs to be done? Are we talking about introducing new Installation Media? New Operating System with a different base URL? I can give you hand with patch review and testing. Quite frankly, I am really busy with catching up with reports redesign and I’d appreciate some help with this.

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I think there are a few things that will need to be done:

  1. Create a new Operating System model for Ubuntu versions from 20.10 because they don’t use legacy netboot images any more. Ubuntu wants to use the live image for all installations.
  2. New templates that will generate autoinstall code instead of Debian-Installer / Preseed.

Currently they do provide a tool that converts Debian-Installer scritps to autoinstaller (GitHub - canonical/autoinstall-generator: Utility to convert Debian Installer preseed to Subiquity answers) which can be used to help with this conversion.

Does this help?

Yeah this is a valid feature. We haven’t even started looking into this, contributions are welcome!

https://projects.theforeman.org/issues/32632

This should not be difficult to add, Foreman already has a userdata endpoint, so all what is needed is perhaps making sure that PXE files are downloaded properly (I think it works already) and creating PXELinux, Grub2, iPXE and autoinstall templates.

Sadly the Nvidia DGX-OS (ubuntu based) ISO has moved to the new Live-Installer too.
Have a few hundred DGX2’s and Workstations in my research lab at work.

I’m also seeing issues with 20.04 UEFI installs via Debian-installer off the Ubuntu Archive error out during PXE. Known UEFI bug that does not affect the Live-Installer in UEFI mode.
Legacy BIOS still works great!

We will be looking into this hopefully soon, I understand this is a problem. In the meantime, you can vote the Redmine issue so we can priorize it in the backlog.

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Hi,

Yesterday I used the method described in 24948 from orcharhino, using the last legacy-image ubuntu 20.04.1 they have made available.

However, at the point of “Install the system” it fails complaining about the missing “live-installer”.

Due to this we are also blocked as we will move from CentOS to Ubuntu for bare-metal installs.

This on a Foreman-server with following setup:

Foreman 3.0.1
Katello 4.2.1
Pulp 3.1.0

I am ready to assist with patching Foreman if someone tells me what exactly to do. But I am busy with my own things, I briefly tested it last year and it did not work and I was confused what on Eartch Canonical did with the installer.