Nicely Nitpick Noble 24.04 LTS

[NoWorries]

It's now the final Month before the Release of Noble Numbat 24.04 LTS

This month has been a very torrid time for me after I took the plunge and installed the proposed-plasma ppa. This broke my system and I spent some time in getting back to normal. The problem that I faced was with calamares installer as against the ubiquity installer. The main problem that I faced was that the EFI partition had to be 300 MiB in size and mine was 275 MiB. I could not increase this partition as the Windows partition was the next partition on my system. The calamares installer does not work with a partition smaller than 300 MiB like the ubiquity installer does.

There may be those on this forum who know how to solve this problem. I eventually solved it for me by installing the first iso that I got for Noble which uses the ubiquity installer. I must say that I am not looking forward to being able to install the next Kubuntu Version 24.10 which will undoubtedly have the calamares installer.

Now for the list of Info Version updates in the last month with the Application Version updates.

	2 Month Status	1 Month Status
KDE Plasma Version	5.27.10	5.27.10
KDE Frameworks Version	5.115.0	5.115.0
QT Version	5.15.10	5.15.12
Application Version	4:23.08.5	4:23.08.5
Kernel Version	6.8.0-11-generic	6.8.0-11-generic

Compared with last month where there were many version updates, this month has no version updates. However, many updates this past month have consolidated the existing versions.

I continue to frequently use Noble and appreciate its stability. I assume that other users of Noble are experiencing the same stability. Since Noble is an LTS, I assume the developers are concentrating on providing a stable and reliable system. I hope that those who update their systems to Noble have more success than I did with the calamares installer.

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

I'll install Kubuntu again once it has Plasma 6 and has had time to get the wrinkles ironed out.

As things stand, that'll be the 24.10 release ("Oblong Orangutan", or whatever Canonical decide to call it).

[rossdv8]

From the bug report I linked to:


And the temp fix for this mentioned in the bug report is to edit a file before starting the installer in the live session:

I planned to give Kubuntu Nobbly a test just because I had the spare computer set up after testing Neon for the last few months.
I considered doing the edit thing, and decided that would just give me Kubuntu Maniac with a very few mods - so I reinstalled Neon, just to play with Plasma 6 again. I'll install Kubuntu again once it has Plasma 6 and has had time to get the wrinkles ironed out.

[Schwarzer Kater]

One could read in Nate's blog today that there will be a Plasma 5.27.12 - so Plasma 5.27 is still looked after (at least a bit…).
Currently the latest version is 5.27.11 and the one in Kubuntu 24.04 LTS is 5.27.10.

I hope Plasma 5.27.12 will also make it into Kubuntu 24.04 LTS.

PS: I think my hope is in vain as Debian testing and unstable both still have Plasma 5.27.10…

[NoWorries]

I frequently enjoy using the latest software as I find it gives better performance. Unfortunately the latest change to the Lubuntu Calamares installer has resulted in me not being able to install pre-release versions of Noble on my ASUS Laptop that I use for testing.

A fix to solve this problem is provided above at Posts #41 and #48. However, on my ASUS Laptop for a full installation, I have found that I need to have the installation USB still plugged in for it to work. I have not been able to create an installation USB on Noble that works without any change suggested previously. For each test of progress I download a 3.7GiB iso file and then create a new USB installation disc. I have no idea as to how long this problem with Calamares will take to be fixed for testing my approach to Noble installation.

I just happened to login to my Mantic distribution on my HP Laptop and found an early iso file dated 30/08/23 that I downloaded for Noble. So because of the above uncertainty associated with the Calamares installer, I decided to install a startup USB file using this iso file.

This installation was successful and I had 1133 updates to install to bring my ASUS Laptop up to date. I have now successfully installed all my applications and networked my ASUS to my HP Laptop. So I no longer need to wait for the Calamares based installation to be sorted out.

[Schwarzer Kater]

NoWorries: This is what I referred to above (and claydoh , too - a solution is also in his posts above).
It has nothing to do with GPT / MBR partition tables or with "legacy" BIOS / UEFI .

But hopefully …/networkcfg/main.py will be fixed anyway in the next days…

[claydoh]

From the bug report I linked to:


And the temp fix for this mentioned in the bug report is to edit a file before starting the installer in the live session:

To implement it in situ, edit /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/calamares/modules/networkcfg/main.py so that line 158 reads like:
os.chmod(f.fileno(), 0o600)
instead of its current state of:
os.chmod(f, 0o600)

[oshunluvr]

Are you installing to btrfs?

[NoWorries]

At least in a VM it was no problem to install Kubuntu 24.04 (development branch) on a virtual drive with an MBR/"dos" partition table and completely without an ESP…

What is the message you get when it fails?

The error message is:

[claydoh]

You should visit the iso testing page
Open the Noble link and.......find this ( and )



And the bug report has a workaround until whatever backlog has cleared up in Ubuntuland
It is a quick edit of a calamares configuration file before starting the install process from the live session.

[Schwarzer Kater]

At least in a VM it was no problem to install Kubuntu 24.04 (development branch) on a virtual drive with an MBR/"dos" partition table and completely without an ESP…

What is the message you get when it fails?

[NoWorries]

The problem that I face is that in the installation process I get the message to configure a GPT partition table on BIOS. The trouble is that my BIOS does not provide this option. When I ignore this my installation fails. When I did an installation of Mantic this was not needed. So is noble not able to be installed on a Laptop purchased in 2007?

Sorry, my mistake, that was a previous ASUS but the one I am having trouble with was bought in Dec 2012

[WonkoTheSaneUK]

Update to my earlier issue:-
The problem has fixed itself via daily updates.
My PC now shuts down when told to, as expected.

[Schwarzer Kater]

You can temporarily use this workaround (or do it "by hand"), but don't disconnect from the internet afterwards or the installer will very probably fail despite the modifications.

PS: at the moment the default session is X11 - plasma-workspace-wayland is not installed by default, kwin-wayland is ("This package provides the wayland version, which is still a work in progress project, and is available as a PREVIEW release. Don't expect the same stability as with the x11 version.")

[NoWorries]

I had trouble with my ASUS Laptop and decided to do a new install with the latest build on the 18 March 24. The Lubuntu message came up on the installation messages. Unfortunately the installation failed.

The error message was Bad main script file. So I am not sure how long it will take for the developers to sort this one out?