UPDATE: The boot issues have been fixed, however, the installer frontend is not yet working due to a known bug. This is true for Ubuntu Desktop Noble Numbat as well. If you wish to test the installation, it must be tested with subiquity. This can be done with:
sudo snap install subiquity --classic sudo subiquity
However, the live .iso image is now functioning.
Greetings to our community!
We’re working diligently on getting ready for the next Long-Term Support release of Ubuntu Studio, right now codenamed Noble Numbat, which will become 24.04 LTS in April.
One of the things we are putting our energy into is moving away from the Ubiquity Installer, due to be sunset, and to the modern Subiquity installer, which has a technical caveat: it’s text-only. However, the Ubuntu Desktop team came up with a wonderful solution: Ubuntu Desktop Installer. It’s a flutter-based frontend to Subiquity which was released as the default installer experience for Ubuntu Desktop 23.04. Along with that, Ubuntu Budgie also released their own version, the Ubuntu Budgie Installer, which is done as an add-on to the Ubuntu Desktop Installer, and released that as their default installation experience for Ubuntu Budgie 23.10.
In following that lead, we have decided to change our installation experience to the Ubuntu Studio System Installer, which is built upon the work that Ubuntu Budgie and Ubuntu Desktop teams have already done. This will make us the first non-GNOME-based flavor to use this installation. However, in doing the switchover on our daily builds, we have run into some breakage.
Right now, our daily .iso images boot to a black screen with a mouse cursor. In other words, they do not work. Additionally, you cannot login to a virtual terminal to diagnose the issue via logs. This is because, upon extracting the .iso image and included squashfs file, we found out that the default live user (normally named “ubuntu-studio”) is not being created upon image build.
We do not expect this issue to be resolved until January. This is because the people that we need help to resolve this issue (Ubuntu Desktop team and Ubuntu Foundations team) are employees at Canonical. Canonical’s developers are mandated to take the final two weeks of every year off, which is why the yy.04 cycles are slightly longer than the yy.10 cycles.
If, for whatever reason, we cannot get this resolved, we will find another path. That said, we request that since this is a known bug and that a bug report exists, please do not file any further bug reports, and please do not attempt any further testing on our .iso images for Noble Numbat (future 24.04) as the .iso images are failing until further notice.
Please watch our accounts on x (formerly known as twitter) or mastodon.art for further updates.
