Notes on UTCS Deployment of Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble)
Publicly available desktops running noble currently include a subset of the gemstone machines:
ekanite though onyx
Changes from Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal):
- python2 has been fully deprecated and is no longer installed. There is no /usr/bin/python, so scripts that expect to see that path will now fail. We believe it is better for this scripts to fail than to behave in unexpected ways, therefore we will NOT be linking /usr/bin/python to python3 at this time.
- /lusr has received a fresh start, wiping away more than a decade of old data. While much of that data was cruft, we know that not all of it was. If you encounter missing files or directories in /lusr, please submit a help ticket.
- Several packages are now provided (by Ubuntu) via snap, and snap packages appear to now work correctly in our environment. Most notable are firefox, thunderbird and gnome-42.
Known Issues:
- NFS4 expects file names to be encoded in UTF-8. If a file or directory name was created with a non-UTF-8 encoding (which is quite unusual in our experience), NFS4 may not handle it correctly. In most cases, the file name simply won't be displayed correctly, but in very rare circumstances it is impossible to refer to the file correctly, preventing the file from being the argument of a command (even with a wildcard or recursively), making it impossible to move or delete the file.
- OpenSSH's default configuration no longer uses RSA keys, which can lead to some unexpected behavior. For instance, if you are using an RSA key pair to connect to a remote server, ssh may ignore that key and look for another key or fall back to asking for a password.