Unable to skip network access during installation

I'm going to see if I can get the ubiquity code and fix this myself.

Ubiquity is a lot more complex than I thought. Someone want to help me with this?

This bug report is actually about the Ubuntu package of ubiquity and not necessarily the upstream version of Ubiquity. Subsequently, I am invalidating the upstream Ubiquity task and opening a bug about Ubuntu's version of Ubiquity.

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Which particular version of Ubuntu were you installing when you noticed this bug report? Thanks in advance.

Whoops--It was Gutsy.

I had the same problem on a networking environment, where the configuration is assigned by DHCP, but even the DNS service is unavailable. This network setup requires using SOCKS proxy on IP-only adressed server. The installation stalled at 82% and seemed to not move anymore. The error message, which appeared after long time of waiting, claimed that apt didn't find some repositories on disk (in polish), though the problem was indeed unaccesible network repository, so that was clearly misreported. When I clicked OK on the message window nothing else happened for so long, that I stopped waiting.

The workaround was to manually disable networking in Network Manager.

Proposed actions:

1. The error message has to be exact and correct

2. Skipping just this step would be essential, probably with information what's going on ("looking for a server", "waiting for a server" etc), with reasonable connection timeout (maybe 30 s visible counter?) and offering user a choice, not just the plain error message ("Server timed out, try again? - Yes/Skip this step/Cancel installation")

3. The way to configure SOCKS for installer/apt would be preferable

It's a lot better in Hardy. You can't actually skip it as such, and there's no SOCKS proxy support yet as far as I know, but it should time out pretty quickly now and not throw nasty errors.

i just tried to install ubuntu server 8.10. You cannot skip the networking stage and then set the time. I assume as it wants to use an ntp server. Can this be altered so that one can still set the time without setting up networking ?

db: That's not this bug; that's some completely different bug. Feel free to file it separately (on the debian-installer package).

As for the main meat of this bug, the apt-setup-verify source says that the cancel function is disabled because:

# Option to cancel an action does not currently work:
# - application does not seem to always react to a cancel signal
# - debconf-apt-progress does not exit with code 30 when cancelled
# - even if it did, the exit code would be mangled by in-target
# See also thread http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/01/msg00094.html

I'd like to fix this for karmic, and will target it appropriately.

I've made some progress here on the obvious underlying issues. In debconf:

  * debconf-apt-progress: If we get cancelled very early on before managing
    to start the process we're controlling, make sure that we don't carry on
    and start it anyway, and that we still return 30.
  * debconf-apt-progress: Handle cancellation right at the end. We don't
    have a process to kill at this point, but we should at least return the
    correct exit code.

... and in debian-installer-utils:

  * Change in-target and apt-install to pass through non-zero exit codes
    unmolested rather than collapsing them to 1. In particular, this allows
    cancellation exit codes from debconf-apt-progress to be detected by
    apt-setup (see
    http://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2008/01/msg00094.html).

I'll see how well things work when these changes make their way into Ubuntu installer builds.

@Colin Watson:
Isnt Bug #294523 a dup of this?

@Colin Watson:
Also, Bug #294523 has a papercut task , while this seems like a non-trivial fix.
You seem to have put considerable effort into fixing this issue.

I'd leave it to you to decide whether this is can be a papercut or not.
Thanks.

The bugs are related, but I think the relationship may well be that fixing bug 294523 is blocked on this bug, rather than that it's a duplicate as such.

Adding papercut task from dup.

Colin , the papercut task is at your discretion.

@Colin Watson,
The suggestion is based on my impression that the only 2 process are the apt-get update and download of language packs.
Or are there other processes?

It will be much easier for me to fix this bug and then find out what's
left, than to figure out the answer to your question in advance.
(However, I'm on holiday next week.)

I have reverted the excessively generic bug title to the original one, which was much more descriptive. Where possible, bugs should be about single technical changes, not "user-friendly installation" which is so vague as to be unfixable.

I would greatly appreciate it if people stopped fiddling around with the metadata on this bug. Thank you. :-)

No problem , I just wanted the bug to be clearer for David... :) , Sometimes when Papercuts team sees a bug it becomes tough to notice the usability issue... Since there has been a lot of response to papercuts , we sometimes change the descriptions to keep track...

--------------------------------------------
Description:
Currently, the installer stalls at 82% with no user-freindly instructions or feedback about the download progress.
This takes a considerable amount of time with slow connections and new users often wonder if the installation has stalled.

Present dialogue :

Configuring apt
  [ 82% ]
Scanning the mirror....

New users dont know what apt or mirror actually means!

Suggestion:
Explain the process better and allow users to skip the downloads.

Configuring update-manager
  [ 82% ]
Updating from network...

Downloading language packs (N Mb) ...
  [ 82% ]
Language packs are essential for better localization of the Ubuntu install.

                                                   Skip this step

as a regular ubuntu user with a slow and expensive dsl internet connection i thank you for working on this issue. note that it was me who had attempted to mark this as a papercut then it was deemed too complex to be a papercut and i didnt know how to un-mark it as a papercut so that this bug would be tracked as a regular usability/desktop experience problem. but i am glad that it is finally being worked on because it was a really poor experience right at the very beginning of ubuntu usage - the "OOBE" (out of the box experience) installation part :-)

@colin: once/whenever you have some fixes done, do update this bug so that i may test maybe a daily live iso image? otherwise i will only be installing the next alpha 5 release but would be glad to test and give feedback before then, should there be any updates...

also, i am hoping this is also picked up by kubuntu (which i use) and other variants and not just ubuntu...

This bug was fixed in the package apt-setup - 1:0.41ubuntu2

---------------
apt-setup (1:0.41ubuntu2) karmic; urgency=low

  * Use debconf-apt-progress for our Ubuntu-specific all-in-one-go 'apt-get
    update' run.
  * Re-enable progress bar cancellation. Thanks to debian-installer-utils
    1.70 and fixes in debconf, it all seems to work fine now (LP: #172879).

 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:15:04 +0100

Closing Papercut task , this has already been fixed sunce Karmic and was a feature wishlist.
For further information about papercuts criteria, please read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut.

Don't worry though, this bug has been marked as "Invalid" only in the papercuts project.

Closing Papercut task , this has already been fixed since Karmic and was a feature wishlist.
For further information about papercuts criteria, please read https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut.

Don't worry though, this bug has been marked as "Invalid" only in the papercuts project.