This past week, work done by System76 Engineer Jeremy Soller was adopted into Ubiquity, the Ubuntu installer. Jeremy’s work fixes a number of Ubiquity bugs that affected users when dealing with Wifi at first boot and when installing Ubuntu.

The first problem that was addressed, was WiFi not working on first boot (following the OS install). This was an important bug for us to fix because it would greatly improve user’s experience. The pre-fix solution was to reboot the computer or restart WPA-supplicant.

The first-boot WiFi bug was the result of a SystemD setting that was providing a type of isolation in this instance. Considering the level of control the user has over the machine when installing an operating system, it is not necessary and ultimately results in an annoyance to users. The details of that bug are here.

Following a patch that fixed the first-boot WiFi bug, Jeremy moved on to focus on a bug that prevented WPA-Enterprise networks from being set up in Ubiquity. This, unfortunately, resulted in “an unrecoverable error” (pictured below) when users selected a WPA-Enterprise network during setup.

Before:

As you can see, before the patch when the WPA-Enterprise network was selected, an attempt to connect failed and took the install with it.

The bug that prevented the use of WPA-Enterprise was two-fold. Part of the solution was to patch libnma “lib network manager applet’, which was broken due to incorrect GIR dependencies. This prevented the use of its API for configuring networks (from Ubiquity) via Python. You can see that bug here.

Once the libnma patch was implemented, its use was implemented in the WPA-Enterprise patch. This, along with minor bug fixes surrounding the change, was then proposed as a merge request. The work will likely land in 17.04, however, System76 users have the patches via the image we install on our machines, and thus don’t have to worry about it!

After:

We are proud to have contributed to Ubiquity in such a way that we feel improves all users’ lives when using Ubuntu. We will continue improving the platform and hope that our users will see value in what we do.

To see Jeremy’s talk about his personal project RedoxOS and to hear him talk about his work here at System76, check out his interview with Bryan Lunduke (below).