Nicely Nitpick Noble 24.04 LTS

[NoWorries]

On my Broken Noble system, I did an install from my old Noble iso download which used Ubiquity. Once again I had a large number of files to download. I ignored these and proceeded to install my list of applications. Partway through doing this I found my system was OK, BUT I COULD NOT LOGOUT! So I went and installed kubuntu desktop and various other desktops and related applications for sddm and breeze. I was then able to recover my menu options and I found to my surprise that I now had KDE Plasma Version 5.27.11, KDE Frameworks 5.115 and QT Plasma 5.15.12. Discover now has 731 applications listed totalling 858.9 MiB.

My Noble is now fully operational, and I now have to have to still wait, but I am glad that I got my system back in a rather sneaky way!

[NoWorries]

I have just been updated by Discover with the latest list of several hundred packages. My Info Centre now looks like this.



Hope you all have success with all the new updates -note the new kernel! All the best to you all and the Developers for the Easter Season.

[GrouchPotato]

Did you try

and to apt full-upgrade from the current status of the repositories afterwards and reboot before installing your programs?

Yes I did try that and was getting messages that it was installing x as per my request even though y dependencies would break. Or something to that effect. That is why I eventually, re-imaged it.

PS: it is called Discover by the way and I would not advise to use it in a development version but only to use CLI for package management.

Thanks for the tip. update-manager/discovery were removed during updates. So, I was only using apt.

I would also not advise to install Calamares on the running development release - you are asking for trouble…

Agreed. oshunluvr asked me about that and well I ended up re-imaging unit anyhow.

Regards

[acheron]

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/whats...tories/43729/1

https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/xz-li...e-post-2/43801

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

The latest news is that due to the whole xz/liblzma thing and the move to t64, the beta release of Noble has been pushed back a week to April 11th.
Source - https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble...y-update/43827

[Schwarzer Kater]

As of today the Thunderbird Snap is preinstalled by default in Kubuntu 24.04 (development branch).

There are three Snaps preinstalled in Kubunt 24.04 (development branch) now:

• Firefox Snap (one can install e.g. the Firefox from Mozilla.org to /opt additionally to or after removing the Snap)
• Thunderbird Snap (one can install e.g. the Thunderbird from Mozilla.org to /opt additionally to or after removing the Snap)
• Firmware Updater Snap (if need be one can use e.g. the preinstalled command line tool fwupdmgr after removing this Snap)

[jlittle]

Perhaps the dramas are causing trouble, or maybe the devs took an Easter break. The 24.04 daily build is timestamped 2024-03-28 08:00, and I to install it I had to work around the calamares crashes. Then, discover found about 400 updates, and failed to process them; at least, it didn't show any progress as it normally does. So, I used apt full-upgrade which took about half an hour including about 10 minutes installing the Thunderbird snap. Belatedly I realized this update removed lots of plasma, including dolphin, and on a system restart plasma wouldn't start at all.

I'll wait for a new iso before trying again.

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

Perhaps the dramas are causing trouble, or maybe the devs took an Easter break. The 24.04 daily build is timestamped 2024-03-28 08:00, and I to install it I had to work around the calamares crashes. Then, discover found about 400 updates, and failed to process them; at least, it didn't show any progress as it normally does. So, I used apt full-upgrade which took about half an hour including about 10 minutes installing the Thunderbird snap. Belatedly I realized this update removed lots of plasma, including dolphin, and on a system restart plasma wouldn't start at all.

I'll wait for a new iso before trying again.

The failed updates are due to the Canonical devs removing and rebuilding every Ubuntu package published since Feb 26th, after the whole "backdoored xz-utils & liblzma" security thing.
It's also why the beta release has been delayed a week until April 11th, as stated here:- https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/noble...y-update/43827

[NoWorries]

A few days ago I did an installation of Noble on my ASUS Laptop using the latest ISO as you did. I also found that Discover took ages to sort out what to update and then failed to do over 500 updates with a dependency problem. I then went to the command line and installed synaptic. This package manager conveniently shows those packages which are install and which are removed. I make sure that the ones I select with the Synaptic Package Manager do not remove any desktop files. So my ASUS system is working satisfactorily.

Unfortunately, I had more Discover updates on my HP Laptop this morning and when I returned after going out to Lunch with my Wife, I found that my HP Laptop would not boot! I then found after getting into emergency mode, that my kubuntu-desktop had been removed.

It now looks like one has to be very cautious and know, if possible, how to handle these mishaps. It is very unfortunate at this late stage, that these problems are occurring.

[NoWorries]

Added more details of further problems.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Perhaps I am just lucky or it is because I have not installed any additional software in my two Kubuntu 24.04 test VMs…
Except for neofetch and its dependencies, so I can easily get a quick overview with one command about the state of things and stuff like installed Snaps, locale, disk usage and the private IP address.

I have exclusively used CLI to update the VMs and have not had any problems at all - and I have had updates for 1500-2000 packages during the last few days.

All three of my scripts work in Kubuntu 24.04 (development branch) now, btw - so one also can easily get rid of Snap there now.
And the install traditional Thunderbird script is ready, too, but I don't think it makes any sense to release it before the Beta phase of 24.04 has even started… but it is to be considered a Beta version as long as Kubuntu 24.04 is!

[Schwarzer Kater]

As of today (noble-desktop-amd64.iso 2024-04-07) the Calamares installer worked without crashing or aborting with an error!
Presently you still see the Lubuntu slideshow.


There are three options during the installation process:

1. Full installation (additionally installs the Matrix-based messenger Element, the Thunderbird Snap, the Virtual Machine Manager and Krita)
   -> This does not work yet - see below.
2. Normal Installation (none of the four applications above are installed, but you can select them manually)
   -> This does not work yet - see below.
3. Minimal installation (only the desktop environment is installed)
   -> This also does not work yet - see below.

They don't work yet, though:

1. With option 1 of the four applications only the Thunderbird Snap was installed.
   Let's hope and pray that the other three applications will not be installed as Snaps too when this works…
2. With option 2 the same packages as with option 1 are installed, including the Thunderbird, Firefox and Firmware Updater Snaps.
3. With option 3 it is the same as with the other options.

The number of installed packages was exactly the same with all three options.

I am particularly interested how option 1 will be implemented in Kubuntu 24.04…
I have not tried, if the manual selection in option 2. works.


There also is a new kernel version: 6.8.0-22-generic.

[jlittle]

The error message was Bad main script file

Those messages are very unhelpful because most Python scripts in Calamares modules are called main.py
. For example, /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/calamares/fstab/main.py.

To get a better idea of the error, run calamares in debug mode in a konsole:

sudo calamares -d

Then, one can look back through the copious output to find the error, where one can see which main.py failed, and at which line.

[jlittle]

I tried the new iso, and it crashed in fstab/main.py trying to change the attributes of a swap file. This crash occurs installing to a btrfs, and a swap file is always set up, even if a swap partition is used. The installer wants to set +C +m, (which are No_COW, Dont_Compress) on the swap file.

I've tracked this down to the chattr command failing if the swap file already exists, say from a previous install attempt. The attributes can only be set on an empty file. I mounted the btrfs and deleted the swap file @swap/swapfile, and the error was avoided. The chattr can also fail if compression is set on the btrfs when the @swap subvolume is created, because it will inherit the c (Compression_Requested) attribute, and this conflicts with No_COW, Dont_Compress. In that case, I think one could remove the "c" attribute from @swap before running the installer.

(Understanding this last point took me a while, the error chattr: Invalid argument while setting flags is unhelpful; chattr should indicate why the argument is invalid.)

[Schwarzer Kater]

I am sorry to hear that (I did not try Btrfs but used standard ext4…) - and thank you for de-bugging!
I hope that one of the Kubuntu developers reads this and will correct those Btrfs bugs.