curriculum Installations: <22.04 End of Life this week>

Checks

[x] This is not a duplicate of an existing issue (please have a look through our open issues list to make sure)
[x] I have thoroughly read and understand The Odin Project Contributing Guide
[ ] Would you like to work on this issue?

Describe your suggestion

Path

Foundations

Lesson Url

https://www.theodinproject.com/lessons/foundations-installations

(Optional) Discord Name

No response

(Optional) Additional Comments

No response

Apr 21 '25 06:04 lstephen90

This issue is stale because it has had no activity for the last 30 days.

May 22 '25 02:05 github-actions[bot]

Thanks for reporting @lstephen90!

We are staying on 22.04 for the time being, the 24.04 installer for Ubuntu/Xubuntu doesn't play nicely with the unattended install for VirtualBox, which would require a rewrite of parts of our installation lessons. It's a lot of work, and not something we have the bandwidth for right now.

May 28 '25 12:05 KevinMulhern

Hi @KevinMulhern ,

Figured I'll just reply in this issue instead of creating a new one.

Thanks to Rick N on our discord I was able to confirm that as of VirtualBox 7.1.10 unattended installation does work although with two caveats:

If one is impatient or curious about how the installation looks like then nothing is seen; the installation happens in the background and the VM just shows its beautiful 24.04 green background. Rick said that number of queries regarding 24.04 install causing issues has possibly lessened recently which would coincide with 7.1.10's release. Guess the step in which people are told to wait until a login screen pops up has been working well! If someone wanted to look at the progress, they could look at text flying by with sudo tail -f /var/log/syslog. The VM would reboot at some point anyway and bring them to the login screen.
Guest Additions version of the install is broken currently and it might take a while until this is fixed. This means a section going over GA installation would need to be brought back.

I tested Xubuntu 24.04's minimal .iso, I doubt the full one behaves differently but perhaps it installs a lil' slower.

Relevant links:

Since we have old Guest Additions installation section somewhere in git history this should not be that drastic of a change. I might even be up for it if nobody else is. What do you think?

Jun 05 '25 19:06 scheals

Hey @scheals, thanks for digging into it! @xandora is the best person on the team to make a call on this.

Jun 06 '25 09:06 KevinMulhern

This issue is stale because it has had no activity for the last 30 days.

Jul 07 '25 02:07 github-actions[bot]

Shy bump

Jul 07 '25 20:07 scheals

Edit: Never mind, it was probably temporarily unavailable. It's there now.

~~It looks like they've removed a way to download the .iso file directly. It is seemingly available as a torrent, however. https://mirror.us.leaseweb.net/ubuntu-cdimage/xubuntu/releases/22.04/release/ https://xubuntu.org/release/22-04/#show-all~~

Jul 12 '25 05:07 Eduardo06sp

We really do need to update the instructions to recommend 24.04. I just don't have the bandwidth currently to do more than just code review any lesson rewrites that we need to do.

Jul 12 '25 05:07 xandora

I probably can take a swing at it this weekend and propose changes for review.

Jul 22 '25 20:07 scheals

Just wanted to say that the audio is basically non-functional in xubuntu (VBox and VMWare) in v24.04, as mentioned here

And this fix is required to make it work. (Worked flawlessly for me after that.)

So if you guys decide to update the guide to support v24.04, then I think this audio issue and it's solution are worth mentioning.

Jul 22 '25 22:07 Salman7236

Ugh..., well that's annoying!

Jul 23 '25 06:07 xandora

This issue is stale because it has had no activity for the last 30 days.

Aug 23 '25 02:08 github-actions[bot]

@scheals Hey mate. Do you want to take a stab at this one still?

Aug 26 '25 20:08 CouchofTomato

This issue is stale because it has had no activity for the last 30 days.

Sep 27 '25 02:09 github-actions[bot]

Hi @CouchofTomato apologies, this disappeared from my radar after I changed jobs.

Turned off Core Isolation, I should finally take a stab at this starting tomorrow.

Oct 02 '25 19:10 scheals

Hm. So good news is that sudo permissions seem to be set up correctly with VBox 7.2.2 and Xubuntu 24.04.3 and Guest Additions install A-OK. Bad news is that I don't think auto restart after installation works. The "ghost" installation issue (no indication of installation progress) still persists so this is an issue as there's no indicator that the installation has finished.

There have been some UI changes in VirtualBox that need to be taken into account but nothing drastic. Hopefully I can dig up something for that annoying ghost installation issue.

Oct 04 '25 12:10 scheals

When it comes to the lack of GUI one can just double-click "Install Xubuntu (...) and the GUI is going to come up. So that's sorted.

And OK, I guess me saying that the Guest Additions install is A-OK was a little too optimistic. Not sure if in the past the install was completely borked but as it stands now the install errors out at the very end, hence no auto restart.

This is https://github.com/VirtualBox/virtualbox/issues/148 and the previous tickets linked.

With GUI the finish looks like this:

As in the past, if one decides not to install Guest Additions during the unattended install it finishes properly.

So two ways to go about this:

Let the installer error out at the end and just let users know that they can restart at this point and all's good. Weird but I would imagine at some point the postinstall script is going to be fixed and things are just going to work.
Make the install go without the Guest Additions install postscript and bring back the manual Guest Additions install instructions. This probably is the clearest and least worrying way for the user. Harder to get a signal that the Guest Additions postscript is fixed with this approach, though.

I also did installs for stuff until Ruby, no issues with running the install and config commands.

Oct 04 '25 16:10 scheals

I was talking about this with Rick N on the Discord server on this thread here, and I was saying I think we might benefit from having full installation instructions instead of the current unattended install instructions. My reasoning for this is as follows:

To me it looks like the installation instructions for VBox in itself are already quite elaborate (even though it is a simple process), so adding instructions on full installation of Xubuntu wouldn't add much additional complexity, just lengthen the current instructions by that portion.
Unattended install often fail because of issues that are out of reach of the project scope, so people have little to no control over it.
Sticking to a rather old version of Xubuntu just to not give up the convenience of unattended install seems a very high price to pay.
Full installation instructions are probably much more stable between releases than unattended install procedures.

I'm willing to handle the writing of this new material if my suggestions is considered to be part of the curriculum

I can also help to rewrite the unattended install section, but from what I unsertood, we still ned to wait for the VBox bug to get corrected.

Oct 26 '25 06:10 carvalhais

This issue is stale because it has had no activity for the last 30 days.

Dec 09 '25 02:12 github-actions[bot]

Just want to give a heads up that this is being looked at - just some changes behind the scenes and other things being explored and discussed first, so bear with us 💙

Dec 11 '25 02:12 mao-sz