Testing Ubuntu Live Server images

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nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

I've once seen others installing Ubuntu Server edition on their workstations, as they couldn't install Ubuntu Desktop edition at all (due to extremely poor UEFI support of ubiquity installer). Therefore after testing Lubuntu's Calamares, I just downloaded one of Ubuntu's Live Server images to see how well was UEFI supported by subiquity installer.

The Live Server images have no GUI at all, therefore Canonical needs to write a graphical front end for subiquity using Flutter. The subiquity installer is just fine for me, since I never used Debian Installer's GUI. The installation process was just fine, too. I could reboot into the text-mode user interface. I've also found that the network interface had been properly configured, so I could edit /etc/apt/sources.list and disable non-free repositories (restricted and multiverse). Things were fine until this point.

Then I'd try to install a desktop environment, because I wanted to use this computer as a desktop, not a server. I chose the Live Server image just because of the broken-beyond-repair ubiquity (which I've been complaining about its UEFI support for many years). I chose to install MATE by using the meta-package mate-desktop-environment-extras.

The downloading process was just fine, too. However, when I restarted, I found that I had a weird mixture of Gnome and MATE. Neither of them were complete. Worse still, I could never make network connections "manageable", even if I restored the configuration files including /etc/network/interfaces to the states before I tried to install the GUI.

Now I just want to say that Ubuntu is so bad, no good, and totally stupid.

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

If you are going to install something like Ubuntu then you should try MX Linux. I haven't found a UEFI machine it won't install on. Last one I got it to install on was my ASUS laptop, which has a notoriously nasty and difficult UEFI implementation that other distros couldn't handle. The beta version for MX 21 (based on Debian 11) is out now: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?p=646005#p646005

Works good. As you probably know, it defaults to sysvinit, but gives you the systemd option at boot time. I put up a how-to post on using the latest plasma desktop 5.22.4 on the MX 21 beta: https://forum.mxlinux.org/viewtopic.php?p=587958#p587958

To make it more libre, you have to dig around and remove a bunch of proprietary firmware by hand, just like with Ubuntu. I always use the "vrms" command to help find the stuff to remove. It runs very well with jxself's Linux-Libre kernels and with abrowser from the Trisquel repo. I need to make an MX Libre respin. It's difficult, because by default MX includes a lot of proprietary junk like Chrome in its software "store". But at the same time it's easy, because the built-in respin tool is the same one used in antiX, which is AMAZING.

nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

antiX and MX are good distributions, except that they contain non-free software and firmware by default.

They are Debian based, so I could run tasksel to install any desktop environment.

andyprough
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Joined: 02/12/2015

They also have very advanced live USB persistence options, allowing you to cut all the non-free stuff from the distro prior to installation. That's what I do.

loldier
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Joined: 02/17/2016
nadebula.1984
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Joined: 05/01/2018

Before installing a desktop environment, the network worked properly. After installing GUI, the NIC became "unmanaged".

It may be understandable that there are certain differences between Desktop and Server editions. However, I couldn't understand why I told it to install MATE, but actually got part of Gnome and part of MATE.

Ultimately, my purpose was to see whether subiquity could support more UEFI systems. It's far better than ubiquity. However, I still prefer the Trisquel or Debian Live approach. They both provide two installation methods, either by extracting the squashfs image under Live session (Calamares is recommended), or by running Debian Installer in text mode.