Ubuntu's New Desktop Installer Working On Auto-Install, Active Directory Integration

While the new Ubuntu 23.04 desktop installer is shaping up nicely, Canonical engineers continue to be busy working on additional features and ironing out functionality found within the existing Ubiquity installer but not yet their new Flutter-based graphical installer.

Canonical engineer J-P Nurmi this past week has been working to square away the auto install support for the new installer as well as GUI integration around Microsoft Active Directory (AD) support.

There is now a pull request pending for the Ubuntu desktop installer wiring up auto-install support similar to the existing Ubiquity auto-install capabilities. When booting the live Ubuntu Linux media setting "autoinstall" as a kernel command-line option can yield straight to running the auto-installation when this work lands for Ubuntu 23.04.

Along with auto-install support, another feature being tackled for the new installer is the work-in-progress GUI for Active Directory integration.

The new installer is still planned to be used by default with the Ubuntu 23.04 desktop ISOs. This year Canonical is working to ensure the new installer interface is in robust and solid shape and able to fulfill all of their needs ahead of the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS cycle next year.

Notably absent from the new desktop installer is that so far there's been no return of the root ZFS file-system installation support while it was just a few years ago Canonical was heavily promoting OpenZFS with Ubuntu before seemingly losing interest in it and being content with EXT4.