Updating desktop from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04
: Martin Holmes
Minutes: 155
On August 30 I upgraded my desktop using do-release-upgrade. It was fairly seamless, but there were a number of things worth recording for anyone else going through the same process:
- I was initially unable to do the update because the
/bootdirectory didn’t have enough space. Although I had auto-removed all old kernels, it turned out there was one additional set of kernel files in there, I guess because one version is always kept just in case. I did a manual purge of that older kernel usingsudo apt remove 'linux*6.5.0-45*', and that freed up enough space. - I made sure to keep my existing ssh config when asked, because we have particular configurations for some servers.
- Following the upgrade, three files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d
were generating errors when trying to do updates, with a message
about i386 architecture. I discovered that when updating, apt converted
old files to a new format, and where the old files had an explicit
deb [arch=amd64]specification, the new ones apparently omitted an equivalent line; adding the line:Architectures: amd64fixed this problem. - Thunderbird was converted from a deb to a snap, and although the update
apparently correctly copied my old profile to the new location
~/snap/thunderbird/common, when starting the app, it was as though it started without any profile. The solution that worked was to rename the profile in the snap folder, and copy over the old profile from~/.thunderbird. Although the two folders were apparently identical, until I did this, it didn’t work. Once I’d done this, Thunderbird started as normal. - I had to replace one Gnome extension with a newer version built from its GitHub repo because the old version is not being updated on the Gnome extensions site.
- Several applications were uninstalled, including Inkscape, GIMP, and QGIS. The built-in software search offered to install them from Flathub rather than from the Snap Store, so that’s what I did. Then I got a warning that QGIS was using an unsupported Gnome version, so I just uninstalled it.
- Where previously I was logging in to Wayland, I discovered to my surprise that my current session was using x11 for some reason. No changes when I switched to Wayland. On both, I’m seeing a very slight momentary display glitch when switching between workspaces.
As far as I can tell, everything is now working OK, and the Gnome interface fonts also appear to have been updated to a style I prefer.
Addendum: On August 31, I updated my home desktop, which had a very similar configuration, but there were some significant differences worth recording:
- Although GIMP was uninstalled, Inkscape was not, even though it was running as a deb.
- The problem with Thunderbird did not happen; it took Thunderbird a good two minutes to start up the first time, but once it came up, my profile was intact.
- The OpenConnect software for connecting to the UVic vpn was borked. I fixed this by
purging and reinstalling:
sudo apt-get --purge remove openconnect network-manager-openconnect network-manager-openconnect-gnomesudo apt-get install openconnect network-manager-openconnect network-manager-openconnect-gnome