Bug... Failed Snap Daemon in Lubuntu 22.04 LTS. No Firefox. Help please

Lubuntu Support
,
21

Okay I said I’d drag a desktop out and run my bootable DVD of Lubuntu 22.04 and here’s the results.

Desktop is all Intel inside.
Always have excellent results with all Intel inside desktops.

Okay DVD install kinda slow but not painful.
Start to finish 20 minutes to 30 minutes.

The errors.
Failed to start Dispatcher daemon for systemd-networkd.
Failed to start Snap Daemon.
Failed to start Disk Manager.
Failed to start Snap Daemon.

Okay no lockups or blank screen and the cursor was showing activity so let it keep running.

I let the installer do the install after I entered the needed name rank and serial number.

Install completed after a system reboot I updated and rebooted and all is working well.

Hope this helps.

4 Likes
22

Some fun trivia that’s handy to know…

If you download as a torrent, it has built in checks for file integrity. You can and should still verify it, but it should be exactly the same as the source file.

2 Likes
23

Ah, yes, I forgot about that. I don’t use torrents since I’ve seen a lot of stories about how ISPs have gotten mad at people for using them since they consider the peer-to-peer clients to be servers. I used to use torrents for downloading Linux variants all the time, and they were awesome.

2 Likes
24

I’m confused as to what the cause may be since I’ve actually gotten 2 successful working installs on 2 different desktops.

One of them AMD and Nvidia graphics which have always been somewhat problematic from my experience.

The other desktop all Intel inside and have never been problematic with Linux from my experience.

It’s possible that it could be bad iso downloads but 4 of them.
I find it hard to believe that 4 iso downloads could be bad but I guess it’s possible although highly unlikely.

2 Likes
25

I’ll log here for potential historic debugging purposes. I did get 3 of these messages (I think it was last three; missing the thermal) though order wasn’t identical in one boot on my hp dc7700. If I recall correctly it was the boot where I found dev sr0 errors in the log, and the fact that I could see errors that may explain issues I tended to discount issues on that boot.

I smiled at this; on my dc7700 it sure seemed painful to me… but much of that was the noise; which is why I usually used different boxes for DVD testing (dc7900, d755, d780.)… the sound reminding me of the calamares floppy issue but I had no floppy I could eject to instantly silence the box :frowning:

I rarely find I have bad downloads… but it’s possible. I’ll provide the Ubuntu link for checking your ISO, but I’d just perform what’s found in the Lubuntu manual as it’s easier.

I do find however the write to media fails too often (about 5-8% of the time using sandisk thumb-drives for me, higher on other brands), as thumb-drives/media are made to cost or consumable items. It’s why I always scan logs looking for clues as to causes (squashfs errors, media validation completing on recent release, IO errors etc) using a text terminal.

2 Likes
26

FWIW, I downloaded and booted Lubuntu 22.04 in virt-manager (QEMU/KVM) earlier today, and Firefox worked just fine in the live session. The timing issue possibility is interesting. I’ll try limiting the VM’s CPU usage and slamming the host with Prime95 while testing out Lubuntu - that ought to show up most any race condition. If that works, I’ll try booting Lubuntu in pure QEMU (no KVM) and see if that replicates the bug.

Edit: I missed the bit about writing the ISO to DVD media, so my testing might not actually show up the problems. However, @Bartman was having problems with usb flash drives, so it’s possible that this might at least give us some info.

2 Likes
27

I REPRODUCED THE BUG IN A VM!!! Looks like it is indeed a timing issue, just like @guiverc said.

OK, so the behavior here is very, very weird - on one test, Firefox was just gone, just like the original post described. Attempting to run it in the terminal resulted in a notice that Firefox wasn’t installed. The next test, Firefox appeared, but I didn’t have the presence of mind to try and launch it… The third test, Firefox appeared, but this time I actually tried and launch it… and it didn’t launch. Trying to run it in a terminal gave me the following error:

error: error running snapctl: cannot invoke snapctl operation commands (here "is-connected") from outside of a snap

ERROR: not connected to the gnome-3-38-2004 content interface.

I thought to look at /var/log/syslog on this third test, and sure enough, Snap failed to start at some point in the boot process.

So, here’s how I made this mess happen:

My physical hardware:
HP Z220 SFF Workstation
Intel Xeon processor E3-1225v2
16 GB of A-TECH RAM (DDR3, 1600MHz, no ECC)
Lubuntu 22.04 ISO is located on a 12TB WD Easystore USB drive. ISO checks as good using sha256sum.
Host OS is Ubuntu Studio 21.10.

Steps:

1: Open a terminal, and cd your way to the ISO location.
2: Fire up a VM with this command:
qemu-system-x86_64 -cpu kvm64 -m 4G ./lubuntu-22.04-desktop-amd64.iso
3. Wait for the OS to load. It will take quite a while, since KVM acceleration is purposefully left off here.
4. Once you get to the desktop, click inside the VM window, navigate to the Application Menu, and hover over “Internet”. Firefox may or may not appear.
5. Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to get a terminal, and type firefox. You may be told that Firefox is not installed, or it might give you an error. Other possibilities may also occur.
6. Run “nano /var/log/syslog”. Search for “failed to start snap”. You may find the Snap error message. (I originally said to use PCManFM-QT here, but since this VM is running using pure emulation, it’s sloooooow, and using nano is quicker.)

I’ve left the QEMU instance from the third test open and paused, so if you want to peek into the guts of a VM with a wonky Snap system and an unlaunchable Firefox, now’s your chance. I did leave the VM running for quite a while after getting it to glitch, so hopefully I’ve not already messed it up. Unfortunately, my Internet is metered, and I gave the VM 4 GB of RAM, so I probably can’t upload a RAM dump, but I can try to replicate the issue again with a 1 GB RAM VM, and if things go haywire, I can probably dump the RAM and upload it.

3 Likes
28

You say you tested with an Nvidia NVS 290. I actually am using a slightly newer model on the problem PC, an NVS 300. Does it share the same issues?

1 Like
29

So you guys say it’s a timing issue? Does that mean DVDs are too slow to use for Lubuntu 22.04? Can the timing issue also occur with USB flash drives?

I’d hate to stop using DVDs for making Linux boot media… ;(

The only Windows I still use is Windows XP. I wonder, can I get away with using older versions of USB boot media creators? Are old versions of Rufus still safe to use?

1 Like
30

Timing issues will usually be fixed by devs if there are no consequences for the change… For them it maybe allowing more time before a program declares ‘error’ which would cater better for slower-DVD media when used; but the negative is everyone else with errors will have to wait longer before they get their error report (for other issues). Timing issues can occur on USB flash drives; but being faster (no latency as the head needs to move to other places on the disc) they may not be impacted by this issue.

The fact that @ArrayBolt3 in post #27 had the issue in a VM may mean it’s not limited to DVD which would raise the issue significantly to upstream devs I believe (once we have a bug report for it). If they’re able to re-produce it easily; it’s easier for them to detect cause & provide fix (if possible).

2 Likes
31

I have completed tests on 3 seperate boxes (barebone not VM) installing with DVD media with an external DVD player (ASUS 90-DQ0435-UA221KZ)

  1. Dell Optiplex 7060 i7-8700, 32 GB RAM booting uefi+secure boot
  2. Dell Optiplex 7040 i7-6700, 32 GB RAM booting uefi
  3. Dell Latitude 7280 i5-7300U,16Gb RAM booting uefi+secure boot

Booted into live desktop and waited for the dvd to complete (stop spinning) - then checked Internet menu and selected Firefox which ran after a few moments - proceeded from there to install the OS - all went well and the installs took 3 to 5 minutes depending on the machines.

Interestingly I found that it took ca 45 minutes on all boxes to complete loading the Live desktop. When installing from USB media on these machines the boot time is ca 2 minutes.

So the result is I could not reproduce the reported errors re:Firefox on these machines.

4 Likes
32

That might mean it’s influenced by CPU speed, since the problem doesn’t show up in a KVM-accelerated VM, but does show up when using pure QEMU.

I’ll try booting Ubuntu 22.04 in pure QEMU and see what happens. If Firefox fails there, too, then I’m pretty sure that would make it a snapd issue.

Worthy of note: When I boot up stuff in virt-manager, it has both KVM and QXL acceleration, whereas I believe both forms of acceleration are missing when I use pure QEMU. So graphics acceleration might have something to do with it. I’ll also try booting Lubuntu and Ubuntu with KVM and no QXL to see what happens.

3 Likes
33

My desktops are old as in 2010 / 2008 dual core processors with 4.0 GB ddr2 and ddr3 memory and mechanical hard drives.

@leok your computers appear to be new with i7 processors and 32 Gb of memory and most likely SSDs which is why you have no errors.

I think @guiverc has hit the nail on the head with the timing issue.

In the olden days users used Lubuntu because of the low system hardware requirements to compensate for using low powered computers.

Nowadays most users have bad A$$ computers such as your fleet of computers.

Lubuntu being LXQT is no-longer geared for the low powered computers that are considered useless outdated dregs in the computer world of today.

I have no complaints with Lubuntu 22.04 having any problem with Firefox Snap not working.

My problem from the git-go has been getting Lubuntu to get to the menu screen so that I could start the install.

I had no idea that Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 official flavors were going to take so long just to load to the install menu.

So yes perhaps in my case I may have jumped the gun due to my using old outdated junk computers for modern Linux.

Anyway once installed Lubuntu 22.04 runs good and everything appears to work fine.

I believe the new Ubuntu 22.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 official flavors might take a little bit of getting used to for some of us old farts.

I’m a web surfer so my old junk box builds work for me.

The Firefox Snap ain’t as bad as everyone seems to say takes a few extra seconds after a reboot to open and that ain’t no big deal imo.

Good day or evening to all.

4 Likes
34

Interesting - just for the record I have performed numerous installs witn QEMU (virt-manager) and VirtualBox with no issues.

2 Likes
35

Booted a plain Ubuntu 22.04 ISO using pure QEMU (no KVM) - the thing didn’t even succeed in getting to the “Try Ubuntu” screen (it showed a window about an internal error, but wouldn’t let me show details), but I was able to switch to a TTY and check /var/log/syslog - sure enough, snapd failed to start. Three times.

Booting Lubuntu 22.04 in virt-manager (QEMU/KVM) with no graphics acceleration still allowed Firefox to load just fine, so it’s not a GPU issue AFAICT. Ubuntu 22.04 behaves the same way.

I’ve reported the bug on Launchpad. Bug #1970477 “Live session, snapd fails to start or behaves stra...” : Bugs : snapd

3 Likes
36

Did you mean 22.04 here? or have you reverted to the older Lubuntu 20.04 LTS?

1 Like
37

I’m old and have poor eyesight so yes it should read 22.04 so if you could correct my mistake in that post I’d appreciate that.

Thanks for catching that as the reader glasses don’t seem to be cutting it anymore.

4 Likes
38

I just noted another example of a user experiencing issue like this (or something similar anyway)

3 Likes
39

Partially related…

I just noted Bug #1971905 “md5check should cancel itself on slow storage” : Bugs : casper package : Ubuntu so maybe one part of what slows down a boot (MD5 scan of media) on optical-media (DVD) maybe dropped in the future…

4 Likes
40

Not really off topic but relevant to this discussion as on Bug report:

I need to check but Ubuntu should have 22.04 low memory (a few gig) VM ? I have used Ubuntu core in the past but it is only advertised for embedded IoT ? Are users supposed to use IoT Core 20 for low memory VMs ?