Last week, the first point release of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS arrived and upgrades from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS officially enabled.
Only, those upgrades? They didn’t work out so well for everyone who tried them.
So, to prevent any further headaches, Canonical has decided to pause upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS while it irons out the snags.
Yesterday the ‘noble’ release got edited out of the meta-release-lts file (which is what Ubuntu systems check to ‘see’ new version), thereby preventing anyone from being able to upgrade to 24.04.1 LTS through officially-supported methods.
And folks looking to upgrade, who found they couldn’t, wondered why.
In reply, Canonical says it halted upgrades “due to a critical bug in ubuntu-release-upgrader in the way it’s using the apt solver” (though other, recurring, issues have been filed on Launchpad and mentioned on social media since last week).
Of course, issues ought to be expected in any major OS upgrade, more still for LTS to LTS ones since upgrading an extensive foundational stack 2 years apart is far from trivial. Even the most attentive testing prior to release won’t uncover every edge-case calamity in time.
And besides, this isn’t the first time Noble upgrades have been causing issues. When Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was released in April, users on Ubuntu 23.10 were able to upgrade — but later advised not to due to critical bugs (unrelated to this one).
Developers are working to resolve the issue causing LTS to LTS upgrades to fail for some users at the moment, but until that’s ready, they’re playing it say.
Upgrades to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS from 22.04 will be re-enabled once the relevant fixes are out, in place, and passed testing.
Still, once those upgrades are enabled I’d recommend anyone planning to make the leap to keep some ‘recovery media’ (like a bootable Ubuntu installer on a USB drive) to hand — just in case.
Thanks Scott