Nicely Nitpick Noble 24.04 LTS

[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.

[oshunluvr]

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

[Schwarzer Kater]

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

[oshunluvr]

Chicken...lol

[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.

[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!

[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]

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?

[TWPonKubuntu]

Schwarzer Kater , thanks for the very good instructions on how to avoid the snap problem.

TWP

[Montmorency]

what do you think?

I think you're very thorough, thanks.

[Schwarzer Kater]

UPDATE:

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 Snap (!)
   
   - (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 could very probably also become the case with Thunderbird, Krita and Element in 24.04 - although I was still able to install Krita directly from the Ubuntu repositories as a "real" .deb.
In contrary Thunderbird and Element are not available (anymore) as "real" .debs directly from the Ubuntu repositories for 24.04.

I will try my best to make it possible to remove and block Snap as easily as it was possible in the Kubuntu versions before and to give the users easily applied alternatives for the removed Snaps with my scripts…

For the Element Snap at the moment I only see the alternative to give the tip to install e.g the Signal messenger instead - any better ideas?

[oshunluvr]

I downloaded this morning's beta ISO and installed it to bare metal to test it out.

I edited Calamares to modify the BTRFS subvolume names as I detailed here and booted to the ISO directly from GRUB - no sense in wasting time making a LiveUSB

The installer failed during grub-install which for me isn't a big deal since I boot to a dedicated grub install. I'm not sure what the problem was with that. I even installed it twice just to see if was the drive in question. It failed both on a hard drive and an NVME drive.

One thing I noticed that I felt was somewhat dangerous about the Calamares installer: On the install partition selection page (manual partitioning), if you select the boot device for GRUB first and then select the partition for the install, it changes the drive for grub install also WITHOUT NOTIFICATION - so be careful here!

Because the grub-install failed, there was no grub.cfg. So I booted to the install from the GRUB console (something ALL OF YOU should learn how to do, LOL) and run "sudo update-grub" to create a config file.

I suspect because the grub install failed and therefore, technically the install failed - when I booted up I was presented with the installer screen - "Try Kubuntu...Install Kubuntu" - rather than the desktop. I found this slightly humorous. I selected "Try..." and found the normal desktop - I was required to log in as expected and my user credentials were present. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out how to remove the installer screen then in a brief flash of clarity I went to System Settings and I changed "Session Restore" to "Start with an empty session" and that seems to have solved the issue.

I did a "Normal" install and did not choose any of the additional options for installation. I ran update after getting the boot situation working and 156 packages were updated. That's where I left it.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Did you also get the Thunderbird Snap despite not selecting it in the additional options (but not the Krita Snap, the Element Snap and virt-manager)?
This is what I got with the "Normal Installation" option and the Beta 2024-04-11.

I have not tried today's Daily Build 2024-04-13 to see if something has changed there…

[oshunluvr]

let me check...

[oshunluvr]

Thunderbird, Firefox, and Firmware-updater are all installed as snaps as well as gtk-common-themes and gnome-42-2204.

As I stated, I did not select any of the options in Calamares. Still Beta-mode so maybe not fully defined as such in Calamares. I mean the slides still show Lubuntu, lol.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Thank you for the info!

[jlittle]

The installer failed during grub-install which for me isn't a big deal since I boot to a dedicated grub install. I'm not sure what the problem was with that.

When I've done a manual install I just don't set a location for /boot/efi. It complains but proceeds and doesn't attempt a grub install.

[oshunluvr]

When I've done a manual install I just don't set a location for /boot/efi. It complains but proceeds and doesn't attempt a grub install.

I am using GRUB legacy to boot - no EFI at all.. It simply had a pull-down list of all my fixed drives and had the first drive (nvme0) pre-selected. I actually didn't look extensively at the other options because I don't boot to that drive anyway so no harm in installing GRUB to it. After the first attempt failed, I switch to SDA instead of the NVME drive to see if that was the cause of the failure. The results were the same - both choices resulted in failure - but that when I noticed the unguided change of target devices.

Since I'm booting in legacy mode. The installer did not warn or complain about the EFI partition in my case. It did warn me that using GPT with GRUB meant I needed an 8MB GRUB-BIOS partition for GRUB, which is actually a gross exaggeration. I have a been using GPT with GRUB in legacy mode for many years. My habit is to create the GRUB-BIOS partition in the free sectors not used anymore due to partition alignment, namely sectors 34 to 2047. This results in a 1007KB partition which has been sufficient for GRUB-BIOS.

Now I'm wondering if some artificial limit re. the size of the BOOT-BIOS partition is why it failed or if they've actually modified grub and the amount of space required has changed. My dedicated GRUB install is from 2020 and has been updated in quite awhile.