24.04 Testing - Are you brave enough?

Development
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This topic is intended to capture early testing of 24.04 (Noble Numbat).

The desktop ISO for 24.04 is with the new installer developed in 23.10

The legacy ISO released with 23.10 will not be available for 24.04

24.04 Schedule

  • Oct- Feb - development
  • Feb 29- Feature freeze
  • Apr 01 - Beta Testing
  • April 18- Release Candidate
  • April 25th - Final Release

If you have spare hardware (or a virtual machine or two) and don’t mind regularly reinstalling when (and I mean WHEN) 24.04 eats your installation then feel free to give your feedback here. Early testing will improve the final release

Please use http://iso.qa.ubuntu.com/ for testing ISOs (just click the relevant links and there’s guides as you navigate the site)

Packages and hardware are meant to be tested also using QA trackers: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/QATeam/Roles/Tester

As the above page shows, probably the best way to get stuck in with testing is run Ubuntu 24.04 (either download or upgrade from 23.10 with update-manager -d ) as often as possible for usual tasks (bearing in mind that one’s productivity and data may be hampered by bugs on 24.04!) and reporting bugs with ubuntu-bug and ubuntu-bug package-name as you go.

Alternatively, there is always a huge backlog of bugs that need to be triaged (i.e., progressed towards being fixed), head to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BugSquad for a guide on getting started with that!

Use this query to see if your testing issue has been highlighted by others first before reporting.

This first post will be updated with the latest important info - so you don’t need to trawl through the posts. Remember - everything listed below is subject to change/removal and should not be used as indicative with the beta & later release.

draft release notes TBD.

Applets and mini-apps

For Ubuntu Budgie applets these can be tested via our daily PPA for 23.10 and 24.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/budgie-extras-daily && sudo apt upgrade

  • The network applet now supports bluetooth tethering for network access - i.e. use your phone to be used to access the internet. So you should see your phone in the list of networks. Use budgie-control-center - networks / bluetooth to manage these connections

Budgie Desktop

For Ubuntu Budgie the latest budgie-desktop can be tested via our daily PPA for 23.10 & 24.04:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntubudgie-dev/budgie-desktop-test && sudo apt full-upgrade

The following is an abridged version of upstreams blog announcement for v10.9

Budgie 10.9 is a brand new release series for Budgie Desktop, introducing a redesigned Bluetooth applet, early porting efforts towards supporting Wayland, and adopting budgie-session for session management.

Redesigned Bluetooth applet

Budgie 10.9 features a redesigned Bluetooth applet. This applet now provides direct (dis-)connect functionality for paired Bluetooth devices, battery life indicators, as well as functionality for sending files to Bluetooth devices.Architecturally, our Bluetooth applet eliminates the use of gnome-bluetooth (a helper library on top of bluez D-Bus APIs) and instead directly communicates to BlueZ and UPower over D-Bus. Previously, Budgie Desktop had been using an older version of gnome-bluetooth which did not require Libadwaita and GTK4. As we looked towards expanding our Bluetooth functionality and easing long-term maintenance, we decided to deprecate our use of this older library and similarly leverage BlueZ and UPower D-Bus APIs directly. As an added benefit, this will enable some distributions to completely drop that old gnome-bluetooth from their repositories!

Initial Wayland ports

Budgie 10.9 features some initial ports of various applets and components of Budgie Desktop to a Wayland-compatible library: libxfce4windowing.libxfce4windowing is an abstraction library developed by XFCE that “attempts to present windowing concepts (screens, toplevel windows, workspaces, etc.) in a windowing-system-independent manner”. It aims to accomplish this by supporting X11 through libwnck and support for various Wayland protocols (e.g. wlr foreign toplevel management).While libxfce4windowing is under active development and not yet ABI stable, we choose to already adopt it to make the transition from Budgie 10 under X11 to Budgie 10 under Wayland as seamless as possible. libxfce4windowing enables us to port functionality to support Wayland without negatively impacting use under X11, facilitate early “dogfooding” when our porting work is complete, and more effortlessly “flip the switch” to support Wayland and fully drop X11.The following parts of Budgie have been ported to libxfce4windowing in this release:

  • Show Desktop applet
  • TabSwitcher (Alt+Tab window switcher)
  • Workspace applet

While porting, we took the opportunity to rewrite most of the TabSwitcher. Its window list is no longer rebuilt every time it is invoked and we no longer pass around window IDs between the window manager and tab switcher to build the UX. All of the relevant state and functionality is now internal to the switcher.

Use of budgie-session

Budgie 10.9 takes into use budgie-session, our “softish fork of gnome-session, designed to provide a stable session manager for Budgie 10.x”. budgie-session v0.9.x is forked from GNOME Session 44.x, ensuring that we retain:

  1. X11-related session code up until we are ready to switch Budgie to being Wayland-only
  2. ConsoleKit support for our BSD friends.

Other Improvements and Bug Fixes

Bug Fixes

Other Improvements

Raspberry Pi

Themes

Budgie Welcome

Our welcome app is automatically updated for all 22.04 & 23.04 and 23.10 users

  1. A new Colloid makeover is now available - colloid gtk theme + colloid icons and ubuntu fonts/cursors

colloid-light
colloid-light1920×1080 111 KB

This has also been backported to Jammy and mantic users.

  1. getting started. The information about your NVME drives should now be displayed.
  2. gaming - corectrl. This now installs corectrl from the universe package rather than from a PPA.
  3. this now supports webkit2 v4.1 which is the latest and supported webkit. Better from a security point of view.
  4. our mastodon instance is now accessible from the front-page
  5. recommendations - the weird sized icons are no more - regular 64x64 icons on this page.
  6. budgie-welcome now has noble updates so these packages can be installed. Lots of testing is needed to confirm that all of these installs and works correctly

Additional

Areas to look out for

  1. Bug #2046844 “AppArmor user namespace creation restrictions caus...” : Bugs : apparmor package : Ubuntu
    This is perhaps the biggest issue impacting noble.

All apps potentially are impacted.

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Tried to install today’s daily and the installer crashes when trying to enter a password. Is this a known problem ?

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Yep - Bug #2042893 “install failed crashed with CalledProcessError” : Bugs : subiquity & Bug #2042952 “24.04 install fails because cdrom apt list contain...” : Bugs : debian-cd

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No change in Ubuntu Budgie , but no problem with other flavors. :thinking:

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UB and ubuntu use the same installer. All other flavours use ubiquity so i would expect differences.

Over this cycle all flavours with the exception of lubuntu will move to the new installer. Lubuntu will stick with calamares.

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image
image1278×799 109 KB

I just forced a rebuild of the daily iso (2023-11-12 18:37)

I have also forced a rebuild of the installer for noble - so when running the ISO - BEFORE the installer launches run snap refresh to get v45 of the installer

Then the installation is successful. The refresh of the installer snap isn’t necessary for tomorrows ISO.

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Hi

just a couple of questions more about installer, since I’m trying Noble for the first time:

  • how can I do for adding efi and bios boot partitions in non legacy installer?

  • legacy distribution will survive or it will be erased after official release in favour of “new” (ugly, imho) installer version?

Thanks,
Sil

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From memory it is on the screen where you decide to-do the minimal/standard install - there is a manual option which opens the partition manager.

Yes - it has been confirmed that the legacy ISO will be no more in 24.04 - all flavours are aiming similarly to swap to the new installer with the exception of Lubuntu who will be keeping & enhancing calamares.

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of course, but it only gives you ext4, … etc as choice: no bios_grub or efi

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Best place to ask this is here I would dare to suggest:

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ok, ok, solved: it doesn’t allow you to create any other partition but ext4, …, etc but nevertheless it creates a small partition (1Mb) flagged as bios_grub …

It seems (to me, at least) that Canonical is windows-izing Ubuntu a bit more from release to release: always more complicated customizing it or better, first you do as they want (like Apple) and then you redo everything for customizing decently your distro.

I understand that’s a commercial thing: if installing Ubuntu is a boring sequence of “next”, more people will be attracted, but in this case, why they can’t do a total-beginner-release (like OSX is) and a decent-user-release? :grin:

I’m on Ubuntu since 9.04, coming from Debian, I’ve finally found a good and nice DE (budgie) and I’ll be really sorry if I’ll be obligated to look for something else

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Talking to the team whilst at the Summit last week they actually didn’t have any view on windows-izing or complicating customisation etc. It was rather simpler - Ubiquity was being held together with string and tape and there was no longer any serious knowledge left in the team to maintain it. Every cycle it got harder to maintain - and the 10 year cycle of 24.04 makes maintaining a piece of software that no one really understood kind of difficult (!)

For many years they had already had developed a well defined/architected installer for the Ubuntu Server that was in-fact bullet-proof (it has to be given the cloudy nature and rigid requirements for their paying customers). So the desire was simply to write a wrapper around subiquity for the desktop.

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I’m still experiencing installer crash when entering the password. I’ll give it some more time and try again a little later in the cycle.

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Given that Canonical have closed the last bug report as fixed please do file another bug report against subiquity.

Remember to attach a tarball of tge contents of the /var/log/installer folder

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I try to install Budgie, but ut will not work. Install from legacy I stuck with the login screen, and do not know the password.
If I try the new install, the installation hangs on a black screen.

Budgie
Budgie1172×685 32.9 KB

Budgie legacy
Budgie legacy1070×617 40.9 KB

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Is this 24.04? The black screen will be fixed in todays daily.

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Sorry, yes it is 24.04. Thanks.

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Not sure where we post issues with 24.04. I installed the thunar file manager. If I start it with sudo e.g.
$ sudo thunar is works.
However, if started in terminal just as
$ thunar it aborts the budgie session and kick me back to the login screen. Same behavior when launched from the budgie menu.

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Jump in a TTY, login and run journalctl -ae --full

Scroll back via the cursor keys to see where the crash has occurred.

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