Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Upgrade from 22.04 with PPA Firefox

Upgrading Ubuntu to 24.04 LTS while keeping the Firefox PPA

@August 14, 2024

Ubuntu switched from a natively packaged Firefox to a snap-packaged one in 21.10 (or the next LTS 22.04) for various reasons. Many people that prefer not to use the snap packaged browser switched to using the PPA by mozillateam which provides always up to date Debian packages of Firefox for Ubuntu. Alas, for LTS upgrades, Ubuntu disables PPAs (generally for good reason) and now also replaces the packaged Firefox with their dummy package that then installs the snap. To avoid this, make sure you reenable Firefox PPA at the right moment.

To start the update process run sudo do-release-upgrade

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the -d flag is also currently needed since the official 24.04.1 release is not until July 29th, 2024. We do not recommend upgrading prior to the release on production machines.

Some third party entries in your sources.list were disabled. You can
re-enable them after the upgrade with the 'software-properties' tool
or your package manager.

To continue please press [ENTER]

This is the time to edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mozillateam-ubuntu-ppa-jammy.list

Uncomment this line (which was already updated for noble by the upgrader) and save the file

# deb https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/mozillateam/ppa/ubuntu/ noble main # disabled on upgrade to noble

deb https://ppa.launchpadcontent.net/mozillateam/ppa/ubuntu/ noble main

Then exit the editor and press [ENTER] to continue the update process

🚧

As noted above, Ubuntu 22.04 can not be updated just yet. If you do, expect issues. E.g. One issue that blocked the update (prior to the actual changes, so no harm done) was the Postgres / Postgis package. Once removed with sudo apt remove --purge postgres* postgis*, the upgrade went through.

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