Install crash with broadcom wifi

This is interesting. Still browsing through the syslog entries, but it seems the crash happened during the ubiquity.install_misc step. Ubiquity is sometimes a mystery for me, especially after a longer time not looking at the code. Particularly:

This was a no-network installation, so no updates should be pulled from the internet. Third party software was requested, as this laptop uses a Broadcom wifi driver. The driver apparently got installed correctly, although the syslog has some worrying output regarding it.

But the biggest mystery to me is: if this was a no-network install, why right before the error installing some misc packages ubiquity disables CD entries in the sources.list file?! It shouldn't use the internet. There was no request for updates (as no network), why disabling CDRom entries and then running update and trying the install? I can't remember the logic of why that would happen.

Feb 22 12:19:28 ubuntu-budgie finish-install: Disabling CDROM entries in sources.list
...
Feb 22 12:19:36 ubuntu-budgie finish-install: Err:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu jammy-security InRelease
Feb 22 12:19:36 ubuntu-budgie finish-install: Could not resolve ‘security.ubuntu.com’

Might be a red herring, but it's certainly not expected in my opinion.

Also, I don't really understand why ubiquity tries to install some of the packages at the end. Oh, but wait, it seems that it's because for libreoffice?

Feb 22 12:19:36 ubuntu-budgie plugininstall.py: ubiquity.install_misc.InstallStepError: Unable to install , bcmwl-kernel-source, console-setup, cryptsetup-initramfs, e2fsprogs, eject, grub-common, grub-efi-amd64-signed, grub-pc, hunspell-en-gb, hunspell-en-us, hyphen-en-gb, hyphen-en-us, keyboard-configuration, language-pack-en, language-pack-gnome-en, libreoffice-help-en-gb, libreoffice-help-en-us, libreoffice-l10n-en-gb, linux-generic-hwe-22.04, locales, lvm2, mythes-en-us, pciutils, poppler-data, shim-signed, thunderbird-locale-en, thunderbird-locale-en-gb, thunderbird-locale-en-us, ubuntu-restricted-addons, udev, usbutils, wamerican, wbritish due to the broken packages: libreoffice-help-en-gb.

As I see this weird "Feb 22 12:12:24 ubuntu-budgie plugininstall.py: Try to fix these broken packages: libreoffice-help-en-gb." thing two times in the syslog?

This bug has been reported on the Ubuntu ISO testing tracker.

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
https://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/2008082

Ok, investigated this further and I'm starting to lean towards this not being a regression. The issue is reproducible on Ubuntu Budgie with kvm with no networking when the live-session is used. The requirement is to select the GB keyboard layout.

The issue is that unlike Ubuntu, Budgie doesn't ship the libreoffice-help-en-gb package on the live system, only the -us one. These packages also don't appear in the pool. Ubuntu does have those preinstalled. When the GB layout is selected, this causes locale-based decisions and the need to pull in libreoffice-help-en-gb, which is nowhere to be found.
But the same situation was in 22.04.1. I'm trying the .1 image now to confirm, but this seems to have been present in .1 as well - this makes the severity a bit lower. Possibly something we'd want to fix for .3.

Ok, so tested 22.04.1 Budgie and... it seems to work as expected. So my only idea is that something changed in the dependency chain that now libreoffice-help-en-gb is needed with the GB locale for some reason. Trying to identify how and why.

Note. I managed to reproduce this on ubuntu itself by choosing a non seeded
locale (no network) This crashed on the normal install ... live session
wasn't needed per se to reproduce.

On Wed, 22 Feb 2023, 16:20 Łukasz Zemczak, <email address hidden>
wrote:

> Ok, so tested 22.04.1 Budgie and... it seems to work as expected. So my
> only idea is that something changed in the dependency chain that now
> libreoffice-help-en-gb is needed with the GB locale for some reason.
> Trying to identify how and why.
>
> ** Changed in: ubiquity (Ubuntu)
> Importance: Medium => High
>
> --
> You received this bug notification because you are subscribed to the bug
> report.
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/2008082
>
> Title:
> Install crash with broadcom wifi
>
> Status in ubiquity package in Ubuntu:
> New
>
> Bug description:
> Standard install on a MacBook Pro 2012 which has broadcom wifi.
>
> Crash was reported at the end of the installation - the broadcom wifi
> driver was correctly built since network manager became enabled and
> offered wifi spots to connect to - hence this bug report
>
> ProblemType: Bug
> DistroRelease: Ubuntu 22.04
> Package: ubiquity 22.04.19
> ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 5.19.0-32.33~22.04.1-generic 5.19.17
> Uname: Linux 5.19.0-32-generic x86_64
> NonfreeKernelModules: wl zfs zunicode zavl icp zcommon znvpair
> ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu82.3
> Architecture: amd64
> CasperMD5CheckResult: pass
> CasperVersion: 1.470.2
> CurrentDesktop: Budgie:GNOME
> Date: Wed Feb 22 12:20:21 2023
> InstallCmdLine: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz
> file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-budgie.seed maybe-ubiquity quiet splash ---
> LiveMediaBuild: Ubuntu-Budgie 22.04.2 LTS "Jammy Jellyfish" - Release
> amd64 (20230217)
> RebootRequiredPkgs: Error: path contained symlinks.
> SourcePackage: ubiquity
> UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
>
> To manage notifications about this bug go to:
>
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/2008082/+subscriptions
>
>

Ok, pinpointed the issue. We already had the VERY SAME ISSUE, from what I see during 22.04.1. Basically: the apt cache is wrong and includes packages that are irretrievable offline. This is bad. We didn't follow up on this after .1 it seems.

What is happening here is that ubiquity fetches the list of packages needed to support a given locale by running `check-language-support -l <LOCALE> --show-installed`. check-language-support on the other hand uses its own data locale database + queries the apt cache for package 'patterns' that is has defined. Normally, in a correct state, this will only list locale packages that are installed + those that are in the pool. But in our case, the apt cache has many packages that are available only online. check-language-support doesn't distinguish the origin, and it reports back the packages, those go to ubiquity and ubiquity tries to install them - which fails terribly when there's no network.

What we did previously is we repacked the filesystem squashfs after doing `rm var/lib/apt/lists/*Packages`. This way the cache is clear and in theory everything should work. check-language-support then returns what's expected.

Bonus points for finding what the build machinery is doing wrong nowadays.

Tested the latest respin of the 22.04.2 ISO as of now. UEFI + Secure Boot, Broadcom WiFi, used the en-GB locale. Enrolled a MOK at installation time. Installation successful, rebooted, enrolled a MOK, rebooted again, got a working desktop. WiFi did not work upon reboot (bug 2008120) but that's a different bug. I can confirm that the crash mentioned here has been fixed.

Confirmed with my Macbook successfully both live session and normal install - broadcom was enabled afterwards

While this has been worked around for Jammy we want to fix it properly in Lunar so I'm reopening the default task.

Hm, i think apt used to remove lists that are failing to download, but later started to "keeping old one active" thus maybe live-session has always called `apt update` and that used to clear cached lists at runtime, but not anymore.

In lunar it feels to at least worth copying the workaround, whilst we are trying to fix this more.

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.