Report a problem with the installer
We always hope, of course, that every install with the server installer succeeds. But reality doesn’t always work that way and there will sometimes be failures of various kinds. This section explains the most useful way to report any failures so that we can fix the bugs causing them, and we’ll keep the topic up to date as the installer changes.
The first thing to do is to update your Subiquity snap. Not only because we fix issues that cause failures over time but also because we’ve been working on features to make failure reporting easier.
A failure will result in a crash report being generated which bundles up all the information we need to fully diagnose a failure. These live in /var/crash in the installer environment, and for Ubuntu 19.10 and newer this is persisted to the install media by default (if there is space).
When an error occurs you are presented with a dialog that allows you to upload the report to the error tracker and offers options for continuing. Uploads to the error tracker are non-interactive and anonymous, so they are useful for tracking which kinds of errors are affecting most users, but they do not give us a way to ask you to help diagnose the failure.
You can create a Launchpad bug report, which does let us establish this kind of two way communication, based on the contents of a crash report by using the standard apport-cli tool that is part of Ubuntu. Copy the crash report to another system, run:
apport-cli /path/to/report.crash
and follow the prompts.
You can also run apport-cli in the installer environment by switching to a shell but apport won’t be able to open a browser to allow you to complete the report so you’ll have to type the URL by hand on another machine.