Today I tried Xubuntu 24.04 (with an X, but the bug applies to Ubuntu as well) inside VirtualBox and first thing I noticed is that it was crashing. A lot.

And I am not alone.

After a quick digging, the installer heavily relies on OpenGL. But it’s not behaving properly. Particularly troublesome is the Timezone selector. It appears to corrupt everything, but it sounds like the problems are much earlier than the TZ selector and just manifest by then.

Thus it’s going to crash in some OpenGL implementations, but not in others. That explains why some people have not seen this problem while others have. And of course people report “Safe Graphics” helps.

Anyway if you’re affected by it, launch the installer with environment variable LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 set.

Open the Terminal (Ctrl + Alt + T) and paste this:

env BAMF_DESKTOP_FILE_HINT=/var/lib/snapd/desktop/applications/ubuntu-desktop-bootstrap_ubuntu-desktop-bootstrap.desktop LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1 /snap/bin/ubuntu-desktop-bootstrap

Now it will install propertly.

Why don’t I report this? Because it’s not my job. I’m busy and the search function sucks. This bug has probably been reported already but I can’t find the ticket.

I hope someone at Canonical sees this.