Ubuntu 24.04 upgrade report
Heya! I just upgraded to from Ubuntu 23.10 to Ubuntu 24.04 today, so I thought I'd publish a quick blog post on my experience. There are a number of issues to watch out for on this one.
tldr: Do not upgrade a machine to which you do not have physical access to 24.04 until the first point-release comes out!
While the do-release-upgrade itself went relatively well, I encountered a number of problematic issues that significantly affected the stability of my system afterwards, which I describe below, along with the fixes and workarounds that I applied.
(Above: One of the official wallpapers for Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat entitled "Little numbat boy", drawn by azskalt in Krita)
apt sources
Of course, any do-release-upgrade you run is going to disable third-party sources. But this time there's a new mysterious format for apt sources that looks a bit like this:
Enabled: yes
Signed-By: /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sbrl.asc
Types: deb
URIs: https://apt.starbeamrainbowlabs.com/
Suites: ./
Components: ....pretty strange, right? As it turns out, Ubuntu 24.04 has decided to switch to this new "DEB822" apt sources format by default, though I believe the existing format that looks like this:
deb [signed-by=/etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/sbrl.asc] https://apt.starbeamrainbowlabs.com/ ./ # apt.starbeamrainbowlabs.com....should still work. Something else to note: the signed-by there is now required, and sources won't work without it.
For more information, see steeldriver's Ask Ubuntu Answer here:
Where is the documentation for the new apt sources format used in 24.04? - Ask Ubuntu
Boot failure: plymouth and the splash screen
Another issue I encountered was this bug:
boot - Kubuntu 24.04 Black Screen / Not Booting After Upgrade - Ask Ubuntu
...basically, there's a problem with the splash screen which crashes the system because it tries to load an image before the graphics drivers load. The solution here is to disable the splash option in the grub settings.
This can be done either before you reboot into 24.04, or if you have already rebooted into 24.04, in the grub menu you can simply hit e on the default Ubuntu entry in your grub menu and then remove the word splash from the boot line there.
If you are lucky enough to see this post before you reboot, then simply edit /etc/default/grub and change quiet splash under GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT to be an empty string:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""...and then update grub like so:
sudo update-grubBoot failure: unable to even reach grub
A strange one I encountered was an inability to even reach grub, even if I manually select the grub.efi as a boot target via my UEFI firmware settings (I'm on an entroware laptop so that's F2, but your key will vary).
This one kinda stumped me, so I found this page:
Boot-Repair - Community Help Wiki
...which suggests a boot repair tool. Essentially it reinstalls grub and fixes a number of other common issues, such as a missing nvram entry for grub (UEFI systems need bootloaders registering against them), missing packages - I suspect this was the issue this time - and other common issues.
It did claim that my nvram was locked, but it still seems to have resolved the issue anyway. I do recommend booting into the live Ubuntu session with the toram kernel parameter (press e in the grub menu → add kernel parameter → press ctrl + x) and them removing your flash drive before running this tool, just to avoid it getting confused and messing with the bootloader on your flash drive - thus rendering it unusable - by accident.
Essentially, boot into a live environment, connect to the Internet, and run then these commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:yannubuntu/boot-repair && sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y boot-repair
boot-repairsudo is not required for some strange reason.
indicator-keyboard-service memory leak
Finally, there is a significant memory leak in indicator-keyboard-service - which I assume provides the media/function key functionality, which I only noticed because I have a system resource monitor running in my system tray (indicator-multiload; multiload-ng is an alternative version that may work if you have issues with the former).
The workaround I implemented was to move the offending binary aside and install a stub script in its place:
cd /usr/libexec/indicator-keyboard
sudo mv indicator-keyboard-service indicator-keyboard-service.bak
sudo nano indicator-keyboard-serviceIn the text editor for the replacement for indicator-keyboard-service, paste the following content:
#!/usr/bin/env sh
exit 0...save and exit. Then, chmod +x:
sudo chmod +x indicator-keyboard-service....this should at least workaround the issue so that you can regain system stability.
I run the Unity desktop, but this will likely affect the GNOME desktop and others too. There's already a bug report on Launchpad here:
...if this issue affects you, do make sure to go and click the green text at this top-ish of the page to say so. The more people that say it affects them, the higher it will be on the priority list to fix.
Conclusion
A number of significant issues currently plague the upgrade process to 24.04:
- Memory leaks from
indicator-keyboard-service - Multiple issues preventing systems from booting by default
...I recommend that upgrading to 24.04 is done cautiously at this time. If you do not have physical access to a given system or do not have the time/energy to fix issues that prevent your system from booting successfully, I strongly recommend waiting for the first or second point release (i.e. 24.04.1 / 24.04.2) before upgrading.
If you haven't already, I also strongly recommend configuring timeshift to take automated snapshots of your system so that you can easily roll back in case of a failure.
Finally, I also recommend upgrading via the command line with this command:
sudo do-release-upgrade...and carefully monitoring the logs as the upgrade process is running. Then, do not reboot as it asks you to until you have checked and resolved all of the above issues.
That's all I have at the moment for upgrading Ubuntu. I have 3 other systems to upgrade from 22.04, but I'll be waiting for the first point release before attempting that. I'll make another post (or a comment on this one) to let everyone know how it went when I do begin the process of upgrading them.
If you've encountered any issues in the upgrade process to 24.04 (or have any further insight into the issues I describe here), please do leave a comment below!