No obvious way to get to console

[Mark Shuttleworth]

Subiquity is running in a normal Ubuntu ephemeral environment, which means that users should be very comfortable switching to a different VT and then checking things out under the hood. However, when I switch to a different VT with Alt-F2 there is nothing displayed unless I hit enter a few times and wait a few seconds.

Could we display text on those alternate VTs in the live server, so that switching there immediately shows that something is possible? And then put something like this in the bottom right of the subiquity screens:

Alt-Fn Switch Terminals

Alternatively, it might be useful to have a text help document which explains some of this, and then the message on the bottom right could be:

F1 Help

...which would display a scrollable (up / down / pg-up / pg-dn) help text with esc to quit.

[Michael Hudson-Doyle (mwhudson)]

I've noticed the delay on switching to another vt. You don't need to press enter btw, it appears by itself eventually, but I didn't know what was causing the wait. I'd prefer to have the shell appear instantly than having text that says you need to wait!

After digging, this is an obscure systemd thing. Whenever you switch to a new vt, systemd tries (again) to activate the subiquity_config.mount unit we added to support CI. This waits for 90s for a device node to appear. Because getty@.service is Type=idle it tries to wait until no jobs are running before actually starting the process, but it gives up after 5s and starts the job anyway. I think the fix is to override the timeout on the .device unit to 0s, which I'll do with a livecd-rootfs change.

Having some kind of general introductory text accessible from the first screen you see which could explain how to get to a vt and some other basics would make sense.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package livecd-rootfs - 2.504

---------------
livecd-rootfs (2.504) bionic; urgency=medium

  * Override JobRunningTimeoutSec to 0s on the .device unit that
    subiquity_config.mount depends on to avoid a 5s delay on switching to a
    new VT when there is no device there (LP: #1750117)

 -- Michael Hudson-Doyle <email address hidden> Wed, 21 Feb 2018 10:39:58 +1300