Comment 6 for bug 1899632

On Tue, Oct 13, 2020 at 08:58:21PM -0000, Marcus Tomlinson wrote:
> VMWare Easy Install has certainly been supported in the past. It's been
> part of the QA test cases for many years [1] - As mentioned, it does
> work up until Focal, Groovy seems to have lost it somehow.

Sure, but I believe this Just Worked rather than having been something that
ever involved explicit enablement work.

We have recently done some work on the groovy image builds to drop various
useless / unused files on the image. And it appears that VMWare is relying
on one of these files to detect the "first disc".

> How does VMWare decide what is the "first disc" of an Ubuntu install? I
> don't know.

I don't see how we can commit to supporting this without that information.

The only changes to the top-level directory structure of the image in
groovy are:

 - removal of the isolinux directory
 - removal of the boot.catalog file
 - EFI/ directory has been renamed to efi/

The first two of these are not a change we are going to revert, these
changes are intrinsic to the transition from isolinux to GRUB for BIOS boot.

The third change could be reverted; there's no good reason for a system that
is looking for this directory to be case-sensitive, but that's one thing we
could change.