Upgrading Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04

The latest version of Ubuntu Noble Numbat is coming, and many will be tempted to upgrade as advised on the ask-ubuntu site. I would warn anyone trying to do this to hold off for now. Although Noble Numbat itself is getting there, only a fresh install of 24.04 works for now. Currently on 21 February 2024 using sudo do-release-upgrade -d will likely brick your machine. I've tried the upgrade on several different models (all Lenovo) with fresh installs of Ubuntu 22.04 upgraded to the latest versions of everything and the do-release-upgrade -d crashes either at tracker-extract or, if you manage to disable it, at networkd-dispatcher. The machine freezes during the upgrade and can't be reused after that. I had to copy all my files off onto an external drive and reinstall everything. The strange thing is they had the same problem with 20.04->22.04, but somehow they fixed it. I wait for the corresponding update for 22.04->24.04.

Update 4 April 2024: Now sudo do-release-upgrade -d does nothing. It says "There is no development version of an LTS available". So it looks like they are preventing people from running the upgrade while it is known to be broken, but haven't fixed it yet.

Update 17 April 2024: sudo do-release-upgrade -d is back! I tried this on a clean install of 22.04, fully upgraded, rebooted, and ran the do-release-upgrade -d. It welcomes you to Ubuntu 24.04, but still fails. The laptop is still bricked and is unusable after that. The crash file in /var/crash says it was in netplan.script. So I guess this is still a library incompatibility between 22.04 and 24.04, related to networking.

Replace Firefox snap with non-snap version in Ubuntu

One of the problems with the snap package of Firefox is that it can't communicate with programs outside of its snap such as Keepassxc. Also if you don't like the idea of using the self-contained enviroments that snaps implement, and would prefer your applications to live together inside a single OS with its installed libraries rather than duplicating them inside each snap, then replacing the default Firefox snap in Ubuntu may appeal. I'm appending a script I wrote for Ubuntu 22.04, which also works for Ubuntu 24.04. It achives a few things:

1. Deletes Firefox snap
2. Installs Mozilla's latest Firefox binary
3. Sets up apt so that it prefers Mozilla Firefox over snap Firefox when updating packages
4. Adjusts apparmor to allow external programs like Keepassxc to communicate with Firefox

#!/bin/bash # Replace firefox snap with apt package # Ubuntu 24.04 installs the snap version of Firefox. # If you use Firefox in conjunction with the Keepassxc # browser plugin this will no longer work. # To fix this issue you must first remove the snap version of Firefox: release=`lsb_release -cs` if [ -z "$release" ]; then release="noble" fi snap_firefox_path=`which firefox` snap_res=`grep "exec /snap/bin/firefox" $snap_firefox_path` if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "removing snap firefox" snap remove firefox fi #Now we have to prioritise the Mozilla version over the default snap version. if [ ! -e /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox ]; then echo ' Package: firefox Pin: release o=LP-PPA-mozillateam Pin-Priority: 1001 ' | sudo tee /etc/apt/preferences.d/mozilla-firefox fi # Also ensure that updates to firefox also prefer the mozilla version: if [ ! -e /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/51unattended-upgrades-firefox ]; then echo "Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins:: \"LP-PPA-mozillateam:$release\";" | sudo tee /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/51unattended-upgrades-firefox fi # Now install Firefox from Mozilla's PPA: sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:mozillateam/ppa sudo apt update -y sudo apt install firefox -y --allow-downgrades # Disable AppArmor for Firefox to ensure the Firefox extension can connect to KeepassXC: has_readlink=`which readlink` link= if [ ! -z "$has_readlink" ] && [ -e /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.bin.firefox ]; then link=`readlink /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.bin.firefox` fi if [ -z "$link" ]; then sudo ln -s /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox /etc/apparmor.d/disable/usr.bin.firefox sudo apparmor_parser -R /etc/apparmor.d/usr.bin.firefox fi echo "Run KeePassXC and enable browser integration (menu Tools -> Settings -> " echo "Browser Integration, tick \"Enable browser integration\" and \"Firefox\")." echo "Now run Firefox, open settings of the KeePassXC extension -> Connected Databases -> Connect"