Ubuntu 24.04

[brew]

Canonical released Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat, on Thursday (25 April 2024).  This is the first release in the series, so proceed with caution.  However, if you have been using the more experimental and incremental releases, 23.04, for example, you'll experience minor changes, all to the good.

  If like me, you are moving up from 22.04, the new version brings the 6.8 kernel, lowers the latency in system tasks, and a simplified (and faster) installation process.  

  So, yesterday, I took my really old Stinkpad (2009? Lenovo T400, Intel 2 Duo, 8GB RAM, 250GB SATA drive) out of a dusty drawer and did the install using a USB stick.  First problem--the battery is completely dead, but it does run using the AC adapter.  The install started within two minutes, but hung when I selected the WiFi access.  OK, I have a spare Ethernet port on my router, so I restarted the install, and it flew into the first real choice.  The Default installation is just the essentials--kernel, browser, basic utilities -or- you can choose the Extended, which includes LibreOffice, Thunderbird, and the other apps you would expect to see on a desktop.

  I chose Extended, and the installation completed without errors in about 25 minutes (not bad for 15 year old hardware, eh?).  After a reboot, a very plain Ubuntu desktop opened.  Note that one of the heralded features, AppCenter, fails to run, and the web recommended fix is to remove and replace it, sigh.
Did that, but I had to use Apt to install VLC (and make all the usual fixes to get it to run).  After all that, a DVD ran correctly.

  Next step is to try out a variety of desktops--I'm used to Mate, but tried KDE Plasma for a while, and some in the group having me thinking about trying Cinnamon. 

  This is not my "production" laptop, so I am mainly using this as a testing exercise.  I will be trying to break it--no risk, so why not?
I'll report back if I see anything worth mentioning.  Let me know if anybody else is interested in this effort, or wants me to test something.

  As far as my production laptop goes, I will wait for 24.04.1, due in June, and use the automated upgrade option instead of a scratch installation (which I did with the Stinkpad).  Of course, I'll back up my data before starting the upgrade, and I can always do a scratch install as a fallback.

[glenn]

Hey Brew,

Thanks for posting your Ubuntu 24.04 experience. Hopefully the guys will warm up to the idea of the forum and start using it.

--glenn

[steve]

Aah, the joys of installing a new distro on old equipment! 

[glenn]

My installation on new equipment is missing the driver for my sound chip. At least it's not fully supported. I have sound via the headphones bit not the internal speakers. Waiting on a newer kernel that supports my sound chip. I guess I could try compiling the kernel and including the code for my sound chip but I don't know what it is. All inxi can tell me is it is an AMD ACP/ACP3X/ACP6x Audio Coprocessor.

[glenn]

Back on topic, Ubuntu 24.04.  The image is too big for a DVD, weighing in at 6 Gig.  It's a good thing you can put it on a USB.

--glenn

[brew]

I installed Ubuntu 24.04.1 on my "production" laptop using Ubuntu's upgrade method.  Success!  Details follow.  I did this to see how their upgrade process works.  Normally, I would have done a "from scratch" installation, and I still might.

   Hardware:  Dell Latitude E5420 (from ComputerCorps); i5 CPU; 8GB memory; 128GB SSD.  For this process, I used a wired connection and disabled wi-fi on the laptop.

   Hearing Steve's voice in my head, I copied about 18 gigs of my user files onto a USB external hard drive.  Painless, but took about 20 minutes.

  Started with a standard update, and when that completed, I saw a prompt to upgrade to 24.04.1 and a warning that it could take several hours.
Clicked OK, and it downloaded over 2000 files, then warned me to disable screen lock before continuing.  It took about five minutes to remember how to do that, then clicked OK again.

  It whirled around for about 40 minutes, then asked to be restarted.  Did that, and everything came up, and et voila, Ubuntu 24.04.1 with 6.8.0.44 kernel running.

  Elapsed time, including the file backup, about 90 minutes.

  The good news is that all of my user files were intact, and did some very simple functionally tests:  checked wired and wi-fi connectivity; opened Firefox and Brave; opened a set of PDFs; exercised LibreOffice; loaded and ran a DVD to verify audio and video (via VideoLAN and did not need to re-add the DVD codec trick).

  At this moment, I'm comfortable using it as my "daily driver", and seems to works slightly better than 22.04.

Best...Brew

[LukeT]

Bravo Brew!