Possibility of accepting a network-based installer of Ubuntu as an official flavor?

[Aaron Rainbolt]

On 2/24/23 11:51, Dan Bungert wrote:
>>> On Fri, 24 Feb 2023 at 04:54, Aaron Rainbolt <arraybolt3 at ubuntu.com> wrote:
>>>> I've seen more than one person annoyed by the fact that the mini.iso
>>>> netinstaller is no more.
>>>> The "flavor" would be able to be held in a
>>>> very small ISO file (preferably CD sized), and it would download and
>>>> install all of the packages that make up the Ubuntu system at runtime.
>>>> This would allow a user to install Ubuntu or any desired flavor thereof
>>>> using a single installation medium, rather than having to flash an ISO
>>>> every time they want to make a drive install a different flavor. The new
>>>> installation would be entirely up-to-date from the get-go, and it would
>>>> enable the use of existing small storage media for those users who don't
>>>> have sufficiently sized optical discs or flash drives.
> Hi Aaron,
>
> As Lukasz mentioned, I've been looking at relevant things, and expect that we
> can have the first version of ubuntu-mini-iso running this cycle.  I missed
> feature freeze, so I'll be filing that exception :).
>
> Lukasz wrote a perfect summary of the work so far, so I'll quote it here:
>>> The ubuntu-mini-iso is a small bootable iso that can be either
>>> downloaded and used on a CD/USB-drive or even via UEFI HTTP that
>>> brings up a dynamic TUI menu of what Ubuntu images you want to
>>> download/install to your target system. It uses simplestreams to
>>> select which images, so it'll be quite customizable regarding the
>>> selection. The difference is that it then downloads the
>>> iso-of-interest into memory and chain-boots into it, allowing the
>>> installation of any image as one would normally do. This has some
>>> limitations of course, since it needs sufficiently enough RAM.
> So I think that will address much of what you were aiming for.
>
> Size: the bootleg builds I'm doing of this are around 140 MiB, I expect the
> official builds to produce a similar answer.  It could potentially be smaller,
> the size today is dominated by use of the existing Ubuntu initrd with a few
> things added on top. (compare to the size of /boot/initrd.img)
>
> Download at runtime: ubuntu-mini-iso achieves this by presenting a menu of ISOs
> that we could download, then with the user selection, reserving some memory,
> downloading that ISO, and then kexecing to it.
>
> ISOs in the menu: there is a casper hook that downloads simplestream json data
> and hands it to the menu application, a small ncurses app that analyzes the
> json, finds what ISOs to offer, and does so.  The user chooses an entry from
> the menu, that info is handed back to the casper scripts, which download it and
> we chain boot.
>
> That menu could be extended for Flavors support, perhaps conceptually similar
> to how flavors are shown today on https://releases.ubuntu.com/.  The relevant
> code is at: https://github.com/canonical/mini-iso-tools
> It's not necessary to build an ISO to start playing with the menu, if you
> download that, get the dependencies installed, `make run`, and you can see what
> the menu looks like.
If I actually wanted to build the ISO to test my changes "live", how 
would I do that? I assume there are docs somewhere for building an ISO 
from scratch but I don't know where I would look for those, and I'm not 
sure if the mini iso would require different instructions
> If you're interested to help, Aaron, a good starting point would be to add
> entries to https://github.com/canonical/mini-iso-tools/blob/main/json.c#L27 to
> teach the menu how to read the simplestreams for the flavors.
>
> The existing menu can fit on a single screen, so if we start adding flavors I
> think it will need some nested menu support, but that's achievable.
Sounds like a good starting point, I'm thinking about looking into this 
pretty soon. I know a bit of C, so I might be able to help implement 
that, hopefully.
> I have done a hacked test run of having this new mini-iso chainboot to lubuntu
> 22.04.2 and it all works fine.
>
> -Dan

-- 
Aaron Rainbolt
Lubuntu Developer
https://github.com/ArrayBolt3
https://launchpad.net/~arraybolt3
@arraybolt3:lubuntu.me on Matrix, arraybolt3 on irc.libera.chat

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