Ubuntu 24.04 R Pi. Problems with the new 16GB Pi 5

Support and Help
1

I have just recieved a RPi 5 16GB today and have encountered a few problems.

  1. The App centre will not open and when trying to do so…freezes the computer completely requiring a hard shutdown.
  2. Firefox and Brave (snap installations) do not open properly. I just obtain heavily pixelated screens.
    These programs run perfectly on the Pi 4 and the Pi 5 8GB. Any suggestions as to what I can do. I am afraid that as Linux has become so polished…over the years I have become very deskilled.
2

All these snaps use the gnome snap extension (see snap list and snap connections ...), and use the mesa (gles) libs from there… The new pi likely needs a newer mesa version…

3

I received mine yesterday aswell and have the exact same problems on Ubuntu 24.04. This also affects chromium here. Chromium still can be run using the chromium --disable-gpu command and firefox works after disabling hardware acceleration in the settings.
A similar issue has been described before and with the 8 GB version here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/17y46u6/raspberry_pi_5_graphic_issues_with_browsers/

In my case it is not related to overclock settings. I also tried creating a new user account and it did not help. The same system runs perfectly on my RPi5 8 GB.

4

I updated mesa using the kisak-mesa ppa and this did not fix the issue.

5

@ogra means a newer mesa in the snap or a newer version of mesa in the mesa-2404 snap. Snaps don’t use system libraries; their dependencies are self-contained or they rely on other snaps. There’s really not much for you to do except wait for the mesa-2404 snap to be updated.

FWIW, no issues with the 8GB RPi 5 here (older model), so the 16GB RPi must have a newer chipset.

1 Like
6

I tried updating the mesa-2404 Snap to the latest beta channel (24.2.0-pre2 => 25.0.0-pre2), but the issue still persists. My Firefox window is all orange and unresponsive and when launching the App store the window stays light blue and the system crashes.
Does anyone else have the 16 GB RPi5 and could test it?

7

It simply means the new Raspberry Pi 16GB isn’t yet supported. Have patience, mesa-2404 will likely get updated in due time.

FWIW, Flutter-based snaps in Ubuntu 24.10 on Raspberry Pi had an issue with inverted colors, so there’s a few Mesa-based issues going on right now with Raspberry Pi.

8 
ogra@styx:~$ snap info --verbose firefox|grep base 
base:         core22
ogra@styx:~$

Firefox is using a 22.04 base currently and gets its mesa libs from the gnome extension …

ogra@styx:~$ snap connections firefox|grep gnome
content[gnome-42-2204]  firefox:gnome-42-2204            gnome-42-2204:gnome-42-2204     -
ogra@styx:~$

you would have to update this one (being gnome-42-2204, but I don’t know if it has everything yet, even in the beta or edge channels)

1 Like
9

I just heard though the grapevine that a:

sudo snap refresh --channel=candidate gnome-42-2204

could be a good temporary fix for you …

Once the revision in candidate (see “snap info gnome-42-2204”) got released to the stable channel you can switch back to stable with

sudo snap refresh --channel=stable gnome-42-2204
4 Likes
10

Thank you so much…it works and you were so kind by supplying the command line inputs!

2 Likes
11

@culcreuch57 Hey there, you are really welcome here. I’m really happy to see it finally solved, and please don’t forget to mark the above post as solution.
Thank-you and welcome to the amazing community.

1 Like
12

Quick follow-up on this: the candidate channel of gnome-42-2204 has now been promoted to stable. If you’re still seeing this issue, you no longer need to switch channel, just try:

sudo snap refresh

If that still doesn’t fix things, you may be encountering a different issue altogether.

Furthermore, if you did switch channel previously to work around this issue, you can now switch back to the stable channel as ogra suggested in the solution:

sudo snap refresh --channel=stable gnome-42-2204
4 Likes
13

Thank you again for the ‘after care’. I have switched back to the stable channel and everything is running smoothly.