snaps are installed in the background during first boot

[Andreas Hasenack]

During installation, I selected various snaps to be installed on the machine. To my initial surprise, after I logged in none were available.

Not only that, the terminal was getting polluted every few seconds with messages from the boot process, and it dawned on me that the snaps were still being installed.

Maybe it would be worth it to temporarily adjust the MOTD while the installation is finishing up. Or some other way to tell the user that the installation isn't finished yet.

Alternatively, have the snaps be installed during the actual installation, and not during first boot.

[Ryan Harper (raharper)]

Certainly worth mentioning in the installer that the snaps will be installed during first-boot.

And I do like the MOTD idea.

Lastly, I wonder if there's some way to

1) prevent the messages from the install leaking out
2) snapd to mention it's installing snaps (and which ones, etc).

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

The messages leaking out are IIRC from systemd as mounts get created and so on. I'm not sure what we could do to suppress them.

Updating MOTD sounds good, don't off the top of my head know how to do that either.

Installing snaps in the installer is a bit tricky. One option that I had code for is to download the snaps in the installer and create a seed.yaml so that at least (in most cases) snapd doesn't have to download stuff at first boot, although there are some rough corner cases with that that require snapd changes to file off (making sure we depend any custom bases for a snap, that sort of thing).

Another option I also had code for is to create a container around the installed system and boot that before booting into the installed system proper, but that's tricky too (when is it safe to reboot?).

[Ubuntu QA Website (ubuntuqa)]

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

A list of all reports related to this bug can be found here:
http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/qatracker/reports/bugs/1778226

[James Paton-Smith (jamesps)]

Another thing to note is that if the machine is powered off or rebooted before all snaps are installed, they will not continue to install on next boot.

We have somewhat of a niche use case but in our environment we use the subiquity autoinstall to build desktop machines with a GUI and it is not clear when it's safe to reboot/shutdown once the installer completes.

We have to constantly monitor the snap install progress with 'snap changes' until all snaps are finally installed.