I have not only had this problem on Ubuntu 17.10 I have also seen it on Fedora, Debian and OpenSUSE.
I install OpenVAS everything goes fine, but either 1 of 2 things happen, 1) When I go to make a task it says no results found for scan configus, and 2) NVTs and CVEs etc are all 0 empty even though its been refreshed etc. Or both happen.
Either way it seems impossible to get OpenVas to do anything.