Related
Quick Links
Summary
What does the Ubuntu Mini ISO give you?
If youre expecting a minimalist stripped-back installation, or think itll reduce download times, prepare to be surprised.
We set out to investigate why it exists.
Middle Aged Spread
The size of the UbuntuISO imageshas been growing steadily, year-on-year.
Some of this will be due tousing Snapsfor some of the pre-installed applications.
Snaps pay fortheir immunity from dependency hellthough an increase in size.
Jordan Gloor / How-To Geek
Each Snap package contains its own sandboxed environment and bundles copies of dependencies such as library files.
This leads to file duplication.
All 5.2GB of it, at the last count.
Thats why the Ubuntu Mini ISO looked promising.
Straightaway, that tells us this isnt a stripped-back installation of Ubuntu.
No matter how stripped back it is, they havent packed a working copy of Ubuntu into that space.
What theyve created is a tiny download that lets you select a version of Ubuntu to install.
Tools likeVentnoy already do this.
That sounds like the Mini ISO, but the Mini ISO is different.
Plainly, the installation images arent contained in the Mini ISO itself.
That version is then downloaded into RAM, and chain-booted.
This is what it looks like.
Thats when I hit the first problem.
My test machine had 4GB of RAM, and thats not enough for this method.
With a regular Ubuntu ISO image, 4GB is enough to perform an installation.
I didnt have more RAM on hand, so I repeated the exercise using a virtual machine.
It booted into a GRUB menu with a single option.
As time goes by, the listed versions of Ubuntu will change.
After all, at the time of writing Mantic Minotaur has yet to launch.
I selected Lunar Lobster, and pressed Enter.
Eventually, the Ubuntu 23.04 installation media GRUB menu appeared.
Were in familiar territory now.
Youre given the option to Install Ubuntu or Try Ubuntu.
Choosing Install Ubuntu kicks off the usual sequence of installation screens.
Its a long way round, but weve got our installation started.
Then again, no one has announced that it is supposed to.
The Mini ISO failed to work more times than it actually worked.
The most frequent issue was a lock-up directly after selecting a version of Ubuntu to install.
These technical issues will be addressed, theres no doubt about that.
This is an official Ubuntu supported project, after all.
But putting the teething troubles to one side, Im struggling to see a need for this.
You dont have to create a multi-boot drive or use something like Ventoy.
you’re able to only use it if the target computer has an internet connection, andenough RAM.
This isnt going to be great at reviving old hardware.
Theres no time saving either.
Youre downloading the entire regular ISO either way.
Theres already a tried and trusted data pipe installer available.
I couldnt reconcile this as a portable rescue disk, either.
There used to be an unofficial (and now discontinued) project that did just that.
People wrongly assumed that idea had taken root within Canonical and it was being given official attention.
But thats not what the Mini ISO delivers.
