Ubuntu Studio 22.04.1 and Secure Boot

[Erich Eickmeyer]

On Tuesday, August 2, 2022 10:16:53 AM PDT Simon Quigley wrote:
> As for why this is coming up *now* in the first place, I don't have the 
> slightest clue. In the year 2022, flavors need to at least smoke test 
> *once*, *especially* for an LTS release, to ensure Secure Boot works. 
> Look, I get it, flavor teams may be short-staffed, some more than 
> others, but we really need to take a look at our QA processes as the 
> Ubuntu project to ensure something basic like this is caught in every 
> flavor. (Yes, I'm volunteering to write the ISO QA tests.) It's 
> embarrassing, as a fellow Ubuntu Flavor RM, that something like this was 
> not caught and brought to the attention of the Release Team 
> *immediately*. This isn't personal, I'm not trying to roast anyone in 
> particular, but come on everyone, we really need to do better here. I'll 
> link Lubuntu's thorough test suite here[2], and I would suggest other 
> flavors take our example.
> 
[snip]
> [1]
> https://git.launchpad.net/livecd-rootfs/tree/live-build/auto/config#n132
> [2] https://phab.lubuntu.me/w/release-team/testing-checklist/
> 

This happened partially because of the transition from Xfce to KDE Plasma back 
in 2020 and the subsequent transition from Ubiquity to Calamares since 
Ubiquity's KDE modules are hard-coded for Kubuntu's branding. Ubiquity has the 
necessary facility to handle interfacing with mokutils and creating a MOK, 
whereas Calamares does not, and this was missed during the Ubuntu Studio 
testing.  And yes, your analysis of Ubuntu Studio lacking the manpower and 
resources to test every scenario of installation is correct. We're just not 
popular enough to attract the willing participants to want to help test.

Additionally, I tested on real hardware. I was unaware, until recently, that 
my own hardware that I was testing on did not have secure boot enabled. This 
was a mistake on my part and I own this mistake.

However, I will say that Calamares not having a facility for MOK is quite a 
shortcoming and also prevents the installation of drivers such as Nvidia 
drivers, which is something that Ubiquity can do. This makes other installers, 
such as Ubiquity and even the new flutter-based installer more attractive all 
the time for use cases like Ubuntu Studio, where advanced graphics processing 
is paramount for video production, photography, and graphics design. This, 
however, is a digression and probably worthy of a separate discussion.

-- 
Erich Eickmeyer
Project Leader - Ubuntu Studio
Member - Ubuntu Community Council
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