On Friday 29th August Canonical announced the availability of the first point release of Ubuntu 24.04 “Noble Numbat” LTS. If you’ve been running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS this means you will shortly receive a prompt to upgrade. Alternatively you can manually upgrade via Ubuntu’s software updater or via the terminal via running:
sudo do-release-upgradeThere’s a number of worthwhile changes to Ubuntu especially if you are upgrading from the previous LTS release. Not only will you receive kernel 6.8 with the latest improvements there but there are also a number of refinements in the desktop OS such as the redesigned system menu in GNOME 46, a reworked App Centre which is far better than the old one and also updates to the various tools and packages Ubuntu relies upon.
As always make sure your backups are current and tested before opting to upgrade.
Upgrade Issue on Devices Using Secure Boot?
For me however it wasn’t all that straightforward. There’s definitely a case for doing fresh installs for any desktop OS rather than upgrades. I found the following error after trying to upgrade my StarBook MK V. This was noted after the upgrade failed then I ran software updater to try again:
The shims are to do with UEFI/Secure Boot and Ubuntu’s implementation of it. For my device this was solved by running the following in the terminal and then trying the upgrade again:
sudo apt-mark hold shim-signed grub-efi-amd64-signedThis effectively gets the apt package manager to hold these packages back. From looking around I think that this perhaps has something to do with running Coreboot and upgrading through various iterations of the firmware.
