Kubuntu 21.04 fails to install

[Snowhog]

What! No cassette tape?

[gh4wi]

DVD's are nice to have for old PC's that can not boot from USB Thumb drives.
As time goes by, one must stop using old media (5" Floppies, Jaz Drives, Hard drives, Magnetic tape, CD-Rom Drives, and now it seems DVD's are obsolete.
All of my PC's us either SSD, Compact Flash, or a few HDD for the OS.
I still use 3" Floppies, CD-Rom & DVD Drives, and USB Thumb drives to move files around.
The good news is that my PC's do NOT use paper tape !!! (Chuckle)

[GreyGeek]

Well, did you install from a DVD or a USB stick? This thread is about having problems when installing from a DVD and for some reason, people are taking the thread off topic.

That's because since before 2019 most mfgr's of laptops have not been including optical drives because they are too thick to fit in today's THIN laptops. Even on my 9 year old laptop I took out the DVD and replaced it with an HD Caddy which now carries my second 500GB SSD. Since most optical drives are less than 5GB I mainly use portable USB HD's or USB sticks to offload my data.

[jlittle]

I test various distros.

Unless you specifically want to test that the isos work having been written to media, you can save a huge amount of time iso booting directly from the location where the isos are downloaded, especially if that location is fast, like an SSD or NVMe. No media or copying required.

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[claydoh]

people are taking the thread off topic.

That happens here a little (ahem) on occasion. We are a small bunch, but it usually does not get too out of hand.

[claydoh]

I don't plan on buying 10 USB sticks.

10 of them? They are re-writeable, and if big enough, there are utilities to have a multi-iso boot capability. Only need one. Maybe 2 I keep one around as a recovery disk. Actually has a full OS install on it, not a live session, so it is not an actual install disk.

I agree that you should be able to use DVD media, just don't know the fix for you, digging up instances of problems with this type of media does not clarify much, as far as I have been able to tell from research.

Unless this is happening on different writers, different brands of disks, and trying different (slower) burn speeds (very often overlooked imo), it is hard to say that there is actually an issue with the actual iso *universally*.

At one point I had three optical drives in my main PC, two writers and one read-only. It was the only way I could guarantee I could boot a disk to all the different isos and disk semi-reliably before the burners would stop writing good disks altogether. So I have been where you are, and very heavily invested in them. At this point I can only give my suggestions based on my own experiences and observations, as others are doing as well. But I gave up on finding possible solutions not already mentioned.

[vanadiumboy]

21.04 installed just fine on a Lenovo B50-30 but when I tried it on a mid 2010 Mac Mini it installed but would only show a white screen on reboot. 20.04.2 works fine so I'll stick with that.

Well, did you install from a DVD or a USB stick? This thread is about having problems when installing from a DVD and for some reason, people are taking the thread off topic.

[vanadiumboy]

Well, yes, optical media has always been finicky, DVDs more so than CDs in my experience. Add in the age, condition, and quality of the laser in the burner, and the inconsistency of the burnable media, it has always been a crap shoot.
Sure, things could be better, but often fixing it is as much or more about the devices than the images. Frankly, and unfortunately, with few people using them, unless more of them provide test results in the QA trackers, it probably won't improve if the issue is truly the image itself, and not something else.

No, it isn't a DVD problem. I have a bunch of DVD-RW discs. A few of them have various Linux distros. I test various distros.
There is a problem with the Kubuntu 21.04 ISO.
I don't plan on buying 10 USB sticks. Other distro ISO and pervious Kubuntu ISO work fine from a DVD-RW install.

[claydoh]

Well, yes, optical media has always been finicky, DVDs more so than CDs in my experience. Add in the age, condition, and quality of the laser in the burner, and the inconsistency of the burnable media, it has always been a crap shoot.
Sure, things could be better, but often fixing it is as much or more about the devices than the images. Frankly, and unfortunately, with few people using them, unless more of them provide test results in the QA trackers, it probably won't improve if the issue is truly the image itself, and not something else.

[gh4wi]

Installed Kubuntu 21.04 from usb stick...ok.
Installed Brasero using Muon Package Manager.
Downloaded Kubuntu 21.04 on same PC.
Used Brasero to burn DVD of Kubuntu 21.04 desktop amd64.iso
Tried booting DVD and got same problem as was reported in original post.

Failed to start Ubuntu Live CD Installer...submit Kernel crash signatures.

Then after awhile the PC hangs.
Strange how one can install Kubuntu from a Thumb drive, but not from a DVD... needs work.

[GreyGeek]

After I removed Discover, snapd and chromium, and combined @home into @ so that I have to create only one snapshot archive per day, my Kubuntu 20.04.x is GOLDEN!
Lightening fast starting up and shutting down.

Looking forward to Kubuntu 23.04.

[Don B. Cilly]

Neon only re-bases on LTSs. No 21.x or the like.
And they usually take their time after a release to do so.
Of course it's not Kubuntu, but the difference is just in which packages are released and used in which - and when.
The are so much the same system, in practice, that for almost a year I had both sharing the same /home.
And the only application that didn't like it was... Firefox (nothing to do with Ubuntu). Minor glitch, complained about versions and tried to create a new profile if the two were not the same - all that was needed was to update the older one.
In the end I decided that for what I do I could just use neon. But really, what I have is Kubuntu. With a rolling Plasma.

[steve7233]

Forgive the intrusion, but... I have this "cilly" theory, and I'd like to put it to y'all. Please correct me where I'm wrong.

It seems to me there are two "versions" of Kubuntu. One is Kubuntu "proper", the other is KDE neon.
The former focuses on more advanced/updated kernels and KDE apps, and is more conservative as to Plasma, the latter... the opposite.
Kubuntu, though, you have to continuously update the version yourself. Neon... not really.

Me, I'm not particularly interested in kernels and apps, more in Plasma development. So Neon is for me.
But if you are, and get your kernels via, say, UKUU, and apps via, say, appimage/snap/flatpak, why not just install Neon and have the best of both worlds?
You'd basically have yourself a rolling release, and not have to bother with upgrades, clean installs, and the like.
Or wouldn't you?

Neon is NOT Kubuntu. Neon is from the KDE devs and uses core Ubuntu. You get the newest KDE packages. Kubuntu uses many of the KDE packages but they are not the latest. Neon's packages get updated quickly but Kubuntu tests them a while before updating and mostly uses Ubuntu Stuff. Major Kubuntu and neon updates use the latest core Ubuntu which means that Neon 21.04 will be out soon unless they decide to skip it due to a very sort life ending in January.

[Don B. Cilly]

Well, neon has been based on 20.04 for quite some time now.
I upgraded it "in place", had no issues. It also kept all my old Python2 stuff which would be a huff and puff to re-install from scratch.

Neon user is currently on Plasma 5.21.4 (Qt 5.15.2, FW 5.81.0).
The current kernel is 5.4.0-72.
Totally good enough for me.

[jlittle]

There's much, much more to Kubuntu than KDE and kernels. There's a fantastic breadth of software in Ubuntu that Kubuntu gets. Ubuntu offers assurance that it all hangs together coherently.

For many software packages the isolation that snaps, flatpaks, app images and the like is good and makes the software work reliably and is easily updated. And for some software and some users, like plasma for the Neon folks, the builds of the latest versions are the best. I've been in that situation sometimes over the years with various projects.

But there's a lot of stuff that doesn't fit either approach. Some software is too fundamental to be isolated; file systems, compilers, and the init system spring to mind from my own experience. Hardware issues can need more than just an up to date kernel; f. ex. my desktop needs adventures with DKMS for ethernet to work reliably (thanks, Intel). I formed the impression that KDE Neon had some friction being based on 18.04 until it could rebase on 20.04.

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