Working With Ubuntu 24.04 LTS – Software

Ubuntu 24.04 LTS brings a raft of improvements including the 6.8 Linux kernel, a plethora of toolchain upgrades, security improvements, as well as new management tools.

For the desktop, one of the enhancements is a sleeker App Center. This flutter-based tool makes it easier to find applications. But it still has a lot of shortcomings. A huge raft of open source software is not (and never will be) available in App Center. It’s therefore necessary to look outside App Center to install a lot of open source software.

We’ve already installed many programs in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS outside App Center with no issues. This live blog is here to identify programs which don’t run out of the box, together with solutions. Newest entries are listed at the top.

Let us know in the comments section below software issues you’ve encountered with Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, together with any solutions you’ve found.

Spectacle

Spectacle is a simple application for capturing desktop screenshots. It can capture images of the entire desktop, a single monitor, the currently active window, the window currently under the mouse, or a rectangular region of the screen.

Spectacle is present in the App Center in both the candidate and stable channels. These are snap packages. But neither snaps work under Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

The solution is to uninstall the snap, and install the software using the deb package.

$ sudo snap remove spectacle
$ sudo apt install kde-spectacle

bauh

bauh is a graphical interface that lets you manage your software. It supports Snaps, Flatpaks, AppImages, deb packages, and web applications.

The project provides an AppImage. But it fails to run, outputting the following error:

qt.qpa.plugin: Could not load the Qt platform plugin “xcb” in “” even though it was found.
This application failed to start because no Qt platform plugin could be initialized. Reinstalling the application may fix this problem.

This issue is fixed by installing the following packages:

$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-yaml python3-dateutil python3-pyqt5 python3-packaging python3-requests

Hyper

One of our favorite terminal emulators is Hyper. While it’s a bit resource heavy for a terminal, it offers a sublime experience for command-line interface users.

Hyper provides deb packages for the latest stable release and the beta release. Installing these deb packages in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS didn’t raise any errors. But the app didn’t start on execution. Issuing $ hyper -v gives the message.

[8421:0427/061710.026873:FATAL:setuid_sandbox_host.cc(157)] The SUID sandbox helper binary was found, but is not configured correctly. Rather than run without sandboxing I’m aborting now. You need to make sure that /opt/Hyper/chrome-sandbox is owned by root and has mode 4755.

On our fresh install, that folder is already owned by root, but the folder permissions are set to:

-rwxr-xr-x

To get Hyper running:

$ cd /opt/Hyper/chrome-sandbox
$ sudo chmod 4755 chrome-sandbox

The permissions for that folder are -rwsr-xr-x. And now Hyper runs!