Ubuntu Server's New Subiquity Installer Is Now In Much Better Shape

Earlier this year is when Canonical shared they were creating a new Ubuntu Server installer as an eventual replacement to the text-based Debian Installer that their server edition has been using up to this point. It's looking like this "Subiquity" installer could be in good shape by Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

When trying the new Ubuntu Server installer earlier this year (April) it was in extremely rough shape. It was a mess and really not any better than the Debian Installer or any other text-based installers of other server distributions.

Fortunately, many improvements have been made over the past few months in preparation for shipping it by default in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. When hearing of some recent interface improvements, I decided to take it for a quick spin within KVM.

Immediately it looks much nicer than it did back in April! The ncurses-based interface now has a bit of color while still being straightforward to operate

Wired network setup was working fine.

And it's easy to go with the quick "entire disk" install or manually setup your partitions/file-systems.

EXT4, Btrfs, and XFS (and FAT32/SWAP) are the file-systems readily available from this new server installer.

One pleasant addition that some will enjoy is making it very trivial to be able to import SSH identities from the server installer straight-away. Supported services for SSH import are GitHub, Launchpad, and Ubuntu One accounts.

And then we were off to the races with the quick server installation process. This new server install process is much better than earlier incarnations of Subiquity when tested months ago, though no fundamental breakthroughs to make it incredibly better than other Linux server installers. We'll see where Subiquity leads by the Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" release in April.