I just upgraded my Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04. This is my first reboot.
I was using plasma desktop all this time, so, I am not sure how
to use the gnome unity pad:(
I have 2 problems:
Unity launcher takes a looong time to work. I imagine it is still working on it,
so it will take some time to fix it.
Whenever I try to use a command from the console, I get “permission denied”, despite
that I am already in groups admin, sudoers, etc.
This is my main problem. I cannot shutdown or restart my PC.
in plasma would pop a graphic with the options: Sleep, Restart, Shutdown.
It doesn’t seem to work in the gnome desktop. Any ideas?
On the + side, installation preserved my home, work and Desktop files:)
Downloaded the Ubuntu 24.04 desktop image (iso) from ubuntu .com.
Mounted the iso (read only) on /mnt
mounted a 16 GB flash drive on media
cd media; tar cf - …/…/mnt | tar xvf
restarted from flash drive
Installed Ubuntu 24.04 in expert mode, drawing my own partitions
I mounted the first partition at / without formatting.
I ended up with a gnome desktop as ubuntu
ubuntu had sudo and created user nikos giving him adm, sudo in groups
su - nikos, used sudo to install a couple of packages, but ran out of disk space,
since I was working with a tempfs.
Rebooted to use the real fs, ubuntu was gone and slowly my previous home started showing up
Ofc group ids were not preserved, so even my home has nikos:whoopsie owenrship.
nikos is broken user. Cannot use shutdown, or sudo, not even commands with 644 ownership:(
I have waited long enough for the system to equilibrate and doesn’t seem to want to correct itself. I need a graphical procedure to restart it:(
Forgot to mention that in /etc/group, nikos is not a member of whoopsie…
So if I manage with one sudo to add nikos to group whoospie, I think I can fix it.
Is there a rescue disk for Ubuntu 24.04 like it used to be in earlier versions?
Ofc the real question is that why group access takes precedence over owner
access in Ubuntu 24.04?
It tuned out it was a broken installation.
I suspended my session from top right power option (the only option available)
When I came back I noticed that the power options also included restart, which I did.
Used the live usb flash drive to fix my home permissions, but problem persisted.
Still couldn’t access system tools:(
What happenned is that installer upgraded my kernel to 24.04,but left all my system back to 20.04. Kernel could not work with the old system and the obvious error(which is wrong) was
Permission denied. Did a clean install and everything is fine. Now, for the next 3 days I have to restore my data:(
Canonical: Please enable ubuntu upgrade mode in the installer without formatting. It saves both from backing up data and restoring it. Special warnings should be added like getting the right uids for the (super) user. useradd already supports the -o option. Installation should proceed without formatting, just overwriting the files that the kernel needs.
Well, the path you picked is simply not a supported way of upgrading, the proper (and only supported) upgrade path from 20.04 to 24.04 is to use the update-manager GUI or its command line equivalent do-release-upgrade to go from 20.05 to 22.04 and only after this you go from 22.04 to 24.04 …
There have been many changes between these releases (moves from one python version to another, library changes, package selection modifications, adjustments in the plumbing layer of the OS) and the update tools take care to adapt all installed pieces to the new setup, jumping ahead without the interim step through 22.04 will definitely end in something pretty broken and unsupportable… I’d suggest doing a fresh install and use your backups from before you started messing it up to restore your users data…
Thanks for the info. I wasn’t aware that 20-> 22 could be an upgrade and 22-> 24 another one.
So, it seems that my idea, is not new and is already implemented:)
The issue is that I used the update manager gui, I imagine that is what I am getting from the installation media, and still was able to upgrade with it. I had to try that first, before formatting and restoring, everything. When that failed, ofc I tried the clean install.
Having said that, the update-manager gui should not have done what it did. Upgraded just the kernel and didn’t touch anything else. No errors either. It just immediately pushed me to the try mode as ubuntu virtual user.
Running the update manager GUI on live media will only update what is on the live media, not your OS.
A proper upgrade does not involve the live media in any way, not even remotely. Update manager can only update properly when running off your old installation, that is what it is designed for…
“A proper upgrade does not…update manager can only update properly…”
You lost me here. Are you talking about upgrades or updates?
I was talking about the installer, which should be fixed.
It shouldn’t do what it did. Install the kernel and go on to
a try session…
EDIT: it is really moot to discuss details here, you completely broke your install, pretty please do a fresh install of 24.04, what you did is not fixable…
Here you told it to copy the live session over your existing installation on disk, if you tell it to not format it will not wipe the existing content (since you picked expert mode the installer will exactly do what you told it to assuming this is what you wanted) but only copy what’s on the install media to the target device and then install a fresh kernel…
Sure, but that was 2 days ago. I realized it was a broken installation, thx to the installer, and proceeded to a clean install…Clearly the installer did not do what I asked it to. I never asked it to install the kernel and not the media!
Well, you did, you described it step by step above (installing the shipped kernel is part of the process after copying the live filesystem onto your harddisk and removing all traces of the live session setup from it)…
Buy let’s stop this here, as I said before, this will not go anywhere, please do a clean install and allow it to format everything in the process so your disk doesn’t contain old stuff…
