Trying Out The New Installer Of Ubuntu Server

[Vistaus]

Actually I think it's mostly the "Gamer" motherboards that have mouse support and visuals designed to appeal to 12-year-olds. You think someone installing a server in a server room wants to connect a mouse to it?

In many cases the installation also gets automated or done remotely (ie. via SSH). Well, at least that's what Debian's text-based installer is capable of, I do not understand why they are inventing the wheel here again.

While it's true that installing on a server isn't going to require a mouse, it's not just gamer motherboards that have mouse support in BIOS. The MS Surface Pro series has mouse support in BIOS and that's far from being a game PC. My dad has recently bought a new PC, some stock model from a regional computer store chain built for homes & small offices (so basically a standard PC) and that PC has support for mouse in BIOS as well.
So there you have it: more and more PC's are gaining support for it. But again: yes, on servers it's a different story.

[starshipeleven]

Welcome to 2017. Even motherboard BIOS is full HD with full mouse/keyboard support. Text installer is still needed for all the servers running Hercules monitors...

FYI: most servers are operated remotely, installation included. Especially on VMs. So the text installer is for controlling the installation over SSH (and in older days also over Serial connections). Always worked like this in Debian, OpenSUSE's installer still works over serial connection too (Debian does not, I had to hack the damn iso to enable it).

[bug77]

The only installer that makes any sense at all on servers is one completely headless, graphics of any sort at deployment stage is just utterly useless shite... What really matters is the ability to do things remotely with flexible boot options, robust network setup and robust storage auto-partitiioning... And again, in that regard, nothing is wrong all with Debian installer, especially its net-install flavour.

Sure, the unattended debconf scripting can be improved, kickstart compatibility extended, ubuntu-server-specific options supported, but instead of doing that Ubuntu devs and "managers" opted to do yet another mir... Seriously guys.

I was thinking about something similar: it's more useful to generate a custom image and then simply replicate it (because most likely your servers tend to be configured alike). But between VMs and docker, even that it's all that important anymore.

[leech]

I would say at this stage, most people provision their servers via a pxe server with kickstart or the preseed configs any, right? There goes Ubuntu... trying really hard to differentiate themselves, and in the end just wasting effort. This is why they always catch shit for not helping out with other open source projects. Hell, there was that article a few years back that said Microsoft has contributed more code to the kernel than Ubuntu ever has. Not sure if that is still true.

[cynical]

I would say at this stage, most people provision their servers via a pxe server with kickstart or the preseed configs any, right? There goes Ubuntu... trying really hard to differentiate themselves, and in the end just wasting effort. This is why they always catch shit for not helping out with other open source projects. Hell, there was that article a few years back that said Microsoft has contributed more code to the kernel than Ubuntu ever has. Not sure if that is still true.

Yeah, they contributed Hyper-V drivers so that Linux guests work better in their own VM system, another NiH project. Oh but they're Microsoft, not Canonical, so it's ok. Oh look at this, their contributions were entirely self-serving and they haven't contributed anything since then? You mean those articles about them contributing more than Canonical were just obvious click-bait meant to fuel the morons? Shocking.

[GraysonPeddie]

I look forward to test the installer out in a virtual machine tomorrow with a nightly build. Much better without a blue or purple background. I welcome the change.

[mcloud]

Is there a system where modeset actually works? My intel system gives weird stuff on the VT consoles and my other intel+nivida optimus system gives a black screen, other ppls machines over here with both intel and amd cards also gave weird stuff even on most recent ubuntu