Ubuntu Noble updates on hold while 20th anniversary teaser bears retro-styled gifts

Ubuntu 24.04.1 is still available, but for now you can't update to it from Jammy Jellyfish until a bug is sorted. To compensate, there are some fun goodies coming in 24.10. A few days ago The Reg wrote that Noble Numbat upgrades for 22.04 were available, but we mentioned a number of glitches that were affecting some users as …

[RockBurner]

Had a browse on the Ubuntu downloads page the other day and I was quite pleased to see that the Unity UI/Desktop is officially back.

Currently running 20.04 and 22.04 (with Unity) and upgrading to 24.04 soon, so I hope they manage to sort the issue quickly.

[Liam Proven]

Oh yes indeed. It's been an official flavour for a couple of years now:

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/20/ubuntu_2210_kinetic_kudu/

[Dave559]

Ah, I had just been thinking over the past few days that it must be getting to be about time for the software updater tool to have pinged me to let me know that updating to 24.04 LTS was available. I hadn't realised that it had indeed already been briefly available, and temporarily gone away, until they can fix it.

Likewise, I also thought that the early Ubuntu themes were very pleasingly "human" - an echo of the concept of ubuntu, even, and I find the current flatso design fad deathly boring (and also somewhat unusable - I'd like to be able to clearly see the window borders, please!). It was also a very nice touch that the installation included a video of Nelson Mandela explaining the concept of ubuntu.

Out of curiosity (if you're willing to tell us, of course), where in Africa did you grow up, Liam?

[Liam Proven]

My dad did 2 separate stints working in Nigeria, in two different regions. So although it was only about 7 or 8 years in total, it was most of the 1970s and I barely remember life in Britain before we went.

I don't remember pounds, shillings and pence, for instance.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Being in the Lunatic Fringe. . .

. . . I've been running 24.04 on both my desktop and two laptops with no discernible incident since it was released earlier this year.

I'm using XFCE4 as my window mangler, if that matters. I've used KDE in the past but never had the taste for Gnome or its ilk, which is just a matter of personal preference.

One laptop is just for watching videos and the other only gets significant use while I'm on the road but the desktop gets hard computational use with a couple of fairly hefty databases in use, as well as pretty constant development use.

As a side note, if I ever became BDFL (likely story, that), I'd prefer concentrating on making software more functional and stable rather than adding frippery like "orange and purple tones" or musical logins (which become tiresome quicky).

But, then, one person's functionality is another's frippery, I suppose.

Stable is non-negotiable, though.

[Sandtitz]

"we mentioned a number of glitches"

Does Canonical do QA anymore?

[Liam Proven]

Re: "we mentioned a number of glitches"

Of course. But this is the version in which it transitions to 64-bit times, for instance. That's been tricky, I gather. Also more apps are snaps now, and APT is having major work done.

[GBE]

Of course I had scheduled downtime on Saturday for the upgrade.

I sent out email to users a week or two back warning that <server> would be down for an hour or two on Saturday for the upgrade.

I dragged myself into the office on Saturday afternoon after stopping to pick up some sodas and a frozen pizza to chuck into the oven in the break room.

I sent out a final e-mail that the server would be going down in a half-hour.

After fighting with an ancient KVM for a while I got logged in at the console and did a quick last-minute backup while the pizza was baking.

Then I sat down at the console with my pizza and soda to do the actual upgrade, and presto: the do-release-upgrade says there isn't one available unless I want to force an upgrade to a "development" version with the -d flag.

WTF?

There's no GUI or web browser on that machine, and the "normal" office machines with browsers can't reach the Internet on weekends (don't ask). After futzing around to get a machine with a browser connect so it can reach the Internet, I eventually find out what happened.

Upgrade postponed...

[Yorick]

Upgrade is available again, bug fixed: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/upgrades-to-ubuntu-24-04-1-lts-are-enabled-again/47920

[l8gravely]

22.04 -> 24.04.01 went well on headless server VMs

I did some headless server VMs last week without any problems. but they're just VMs, I had four identical ones to upgrade and if I screwed up I could always clone one of the others, etc.

I suspect it's more the sheer number of packages in a normal desktop rollout that caused the problems, but for targeted servers, maybe it was ok?

[Groo The Wanderer]

?

I just upgraded in the past few days from 22.04 to 24.04 again, and this time the only real glitch I encountered is that the 22.04 Nvidia drivers show up as "manually installed" and won't let you fix them with a simple click in the "Additional Drivers" UI.

Manually remove all Nvidia packages to get back to the default nouveau driver, then you can switch to the proprietary 550 driver and enjoy the fact that over 80% of your steam catalogue is now compatible.

So far the upgraded system seems much more stable thany last attempt. In fact, I've only had the sound driver for my iFi Zen DAC 3 crash once since straightening out the Nvidia drivers, and I suspect that the Nvidia driver installation was the culprit, likely resetting some interrupt hooks on the kernel. No other crashes in 10 hours now; fingers crossed!