Comment 0 for bug 1539266

With dmidecode older than 3.0, certain newer hardware contains a large warning message in, say, the system-product-name string.

For example, this:

dmidecode --quiet --string system-product-name

Would return something like:

SMBIOS-implementations-newer-than-version-2-8-are-not-fully-supported-by-this-version-of-dmidecode-MODEL-NAME

This is problematic because the resulting default hostname built by Ubiquity isn't valid (it's too long).

I while back I investigated backporting dmidecode 3.0 to 14.04.4, but it seems to have problems with older kernels for certain string keys (I was testing with the 3.19 kernel).

Another way to work around this is to have Ubiquity clean this up before using the system-product-name string as part of the default hostname.

So I'm going to whip up a merge proposal for Ubiquity to fix this. Apologies I'm bringing this up so near the 14.04.4 release, I dropped the ball on this one.

Thanks!