Plucky installer crashes or freezes

Support and Help
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1

Ubuntu Version:
25.04

Problem Description:

  • I’m trying to install plucky desktop from a live USB.
  • The iso has been downloaded from here and its checksum successfully verified.
  • the bootable USB has been made with mkusb
  • each time the USB boots, the system crashes as soon as a language is selected in the language selection menu.
  • No such issue with any previous Ubuntu versions, such as oracular, noble, …

Relevant System Information:

ACER AMD laptop

Screenshots or Error Messages:

What I’ve Tried:

I tried to boot multiple times with the same crash.

2

Welcome to Ubuntu Discourse :slight_smile:

Have you tried other means of burning the ISO, like Rufus or Balena Etcher?

Some steps to try:

  1. Make sure Secure Boot is disabled in BIOS, also Fast Startup
  2. When booting, at the screen Try or Install Ubuntu press e and then go to the line that starts with linux and add nomodeset to the end of that line (should be after quiet splash). Then F10 to continue booting.
  3. Also try Safe Graphics mode from the installer boot screen

Do any of these steps get you further?

Report back with error messages if possible.

Thanks.

3

Thx for your answer.
I also tried to create the bootable USB with startup disk creator: I can pass several screen but soon, everything freezes: no more mouse or keyboard.
I’ll try your advices and report back.

4

If you could also post the specifications for the computer, especially RAM, storage, graphic card details that would help.

5 
- I disabled secure boot and added nomodeset to the linux boot.
- I was able to boot and install ubuntu plucky without any issue.
- this seems to indicate an issue with the video mode setting in the kernel
- However, as soon as I boot (without secure boot) into the newly installed plucky, the screen, mouse and keyboard freeze again.
- I've checked /etc/default/grub which contains ```GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"```
- there is a ```/var/crash/kdump_lock```
- the end of /var/log/syslog, auth.log and kern.log are filled with ```\00``` characters
- there are numerous apparmor="DENIED" error messages related to snap
  • I have another partition on the same desktop which boots and runs oracular perfectly; it has linux 6.12.0-16-generic
  • if I install linux 6.14 on oracular, it has the same freeze symptom

System infos:

  • CPU AMD Ryzen™ 7 5800H with Radeon™ Graphics
  • Another graphic card is NVIDIA GA104M [GeForce RTX 3070 Mobile / Max-Q]
  • linux 6.14
6

Based on your tests it seems the issue is with the 6.14 kernel on your particular hardware.

Other than adding nomodeset permanently to GRUB I do not have other suggestions.

Perhaps others do.

Or wait for the next LTS.

7

We could put that serious bug under the rug and cross our fingers hoping it will magically disappear in the next LTS.
Or we could investigate it until it is resolved.
It could come from the Ubuntu built kernel or from the kernel itself.
This issue could potentially affect all AMD users…

8

Best thing to do is report it as a bug then.

See here for more:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs

9

I would doubt that all AMD users would be affected.
I have installed Ubuntu 25.04 with kernel 6.14 using AMD - a few details below
Live and installed sessions seem to be OK with my limited tests.

test@test:~$ inxi
CPU: 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon Graphics (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 1105/400/4830 MHz Kernel: 6.14.0-15-generic x86_64 Up: 5m
Mem: 2.13/27.63 GiB (7.7%) Storage: 540.29 GiB (2.7% used) Procs: 421
Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.37
test@test:~$

Which language do you select?
I wonder if the installer would continue if the default language was used?

10

Thx for testing on your system.

What happens if you upgrade your linux kernel to the latest version (6.14.0-22.22) and reboot?

Also, is there a second graphic card on your system?

Which language do you select?
I wonder if the installer would continue if the default language was used?

English, but it does not depend on that; I was able to complete that selection with another bootable USB but it freezed later on, so the timing seems rather random.

Last but not least, I tried to install the latest Fedora workstation 42 which uses linux 6.14 on the same system and it froze at the first selection screen.

Since using 6.14 on oracular also freezes an otherwise healthy system (with 6.12), I believe we can conclude that the culprit is the stock linux kernel itself.

11

What is strange is that, despite having KDump enabled, I do not see any kernel crash dumped into /var/crash, only:

/var/crash# ls k*
kdump_lock  kexec_cmd
12

Upgraded and rebooted, looks OK to me - here is the inxi report

test@test:~$ inxi
CPU: 8-core AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS with Radeon Graphics (-MT MCP-)
speed/min/max: 1105/400/4830 MHz Kernel: 6.14.0-22-generic x86_64 Up: 4m
Mem: 1.51/27.63 GiB (5.5%) Storage: 540.29 GiB (2.8% used) Procs: 417
Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.37
test@test

No second graphics card - only integral AMD Radeon