Nicely Nitpick Noble 24.04 LTS

[Schwarzer Kater]

You can install whatever .deb you like in any Kubuntu anyhow - but if, after removing snapd and Snaps (or not installing them in the first place like with the 24.04 "Minimal Installation" option at the moment), snapd is not blocked by APT-pinning, Canonical's "fake" .debs will install e.g. the Firefox Snap.

Personally the first things I would do after the "Minimal Installation" would be to just block snapd by APT-pinning (the final Script to get rid of Snap version for 24.04 will be able to do just that even without Snaps or snapd being present) and to install the Firefox and Thunderbird .tars from Mozilla.org to /opt - you could do the latter "by hand" or with the scripts (Script to install traditional Firefox and Script to install traditional Thunderbird - they both already work with Kubuntu 24.04 Beta).

The solution for the Firmware Updater Snap would be to use fwupdmgr in Konsole instead (see fwupdmgr --help for options).
I would consider this sufficient, what do you think?

[Montmorency]

.[*]"Minimal Installation" - additionally installs:
- a great surprise -> no Snaps at all are installed, not even snapd !

That is a good surprise.

You will only have to block the installation of snapd in /etc/apt/preferences.d (like Linux Mint and TUXEDO OS do) and none of the "fake" .deb packages will ever be able to install snapd and smuggle in the Snap instead!

And then we can install whatever .deb?

[Schwarzer Kater]

Todays Kubuntu 24.04 LTS Beta has changed some things.
As written in a post above there are three options during the installation process - but now they "kind of" work:

1. "Full installation" - additionally installs:
   - Element (Matrix-based messenger) as a Snap
   - Thunderbird as a Snap
   - Virtual Machine Manager as a "real" .deb
   - Krita as a "real" .deb
   
   - (and by default Firefox and Firmware Updater as Snaps)
   
   I wrote "real" .deb, because in the past Canonical has had the tendency to smuggle in "fake" .debs which then installed the Snap instead (see Firefox or Chromium…).
   This is very probably also the case with Thunderbird and Element in 24.04 (I had no time to check).
   .
2. "Normal Installation" - the default setting during the installation. This additionally installs:
   - Thunderbird as a Snap (despite it was not selected!)
   
   - (and by default Firefox and Firmware Updater as Snaps)
   .
3. "Minimal Installation" - additionally installs:
   - a great surprise -> no Snaps at all are installed, not even snapd !
   
   You will only have to block the installation of snapd in /etc/apt/preferences.d (like Linux Mint and TUXEDO OS do) and none of the "fake" .deb packages will ever be able to install snapd and smuggle in the Snap instead!
   
   I am very curious if it stays that way and what will happen when one with a "Minimal Installation" and without snapd release-upgrades to Kubuntu 24.10 (very probably you will have to remove the blocking of snapd first if you did this, but who knows)…

That is all for today, have fun!

[Schwarzer Kater]

Kubuntu and Ubuntu Unity have been respun with calamares-settings-ubuntu/1:24.04.26

I hope that this does not mean that the "Full Installation" option will install more Snaps now… I guess we will see later.

[oshunluvr]

Chicken...lol

[Schwarzer Kater]

No, just ext4 with swapfile as I wrote - I will leave that to you, jlittle and claydoh.

[oshunluvr]

Did you try btrfs to see if the swap file issue is fixed? I think it is.

[Schwarzer Kater]

I just tested today's Kubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) Daily Build ISO (2024-04-10 07:30) - tomorrow the Beta is due to be released (and it looks promising).

Installation was without problems (EFI & ext4 with swapflie), but the three options Full, Normal and Minimal installation still don't seem to work.
This time I only tested the Full Installation option and no additional software but the Thunderbird Snap was installed (the same as in post # 102).
Calamares still shows the Lubuntu slideshow (this will very probably be corrected during the Beta phase).

Package versions have not changed anymore from the ones in post # 92, only the kernel is at 6.2.0-22 now.
Mesa is at version 24.0.3 and KDE Gear at 23.08.5.

[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.

[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.)

[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.

[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.

[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!

[NoWorries]

Added more details of further problems.

[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.