App "Bluetooth Low Energy" crashes in "nRF Connect for Desktop" on Ubuntu 24.04

[Helga Velroyen]

Dear lovely people from Nordic Seminconductor,

I have the nRF52840 dongle.

I installed the software ""nRF Connect for Desktop" on my Ubuntu 24.04

For that I ensured all dependencies mentioned here are installed: 

https://docs.nordicsemi.com/bundle/nrf-connect-desktop/page/download_cfd.html

sudo dpkg -i JLink_Linux_V798b_x86_64.deb

sudo dpkg -i nrf-udev_1.0.1-all.deb

sudo apt-get install libusb-1.0-0

After inserting the dongle into my machine, I start the app with:

./nrfconnect-5.0.2-x86_64.AppImage --no-sandbox

It starts up and I can see the list of apps.

However, when I click on "Open" next to "Bluetooth Low Energy", for a second a white window pops up and immediately disappears.

This is reproducable.

There are no error messages in the terminal except for:

[11408:0802/213516.937876:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 1 times!
[11408:0802/213518.371565:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 2 times!
[11408:0802/213522.451264:ERROR:gl_surface_presentation_helper.cc(260)] GetVSyncParametersIfAvailable() failed for 3 times!

However, those appeared before I clicked the "Open" button.

I also checked that the app is at the latest level, which it is: v4.0.4-patch1

Can you help me to fix this, please?

Thank you,

Helga

[Elfving]

Hello Helga,

Thanks for the report! 

Unfortunately I don't think we officially support Ubuntu 24 yet.

Regards,

Elfving

[Helga Velroyen]

I saw that, but maybe we can try to find out what is wrong?

Could you, for example, tell me where the application writes any logs to?

Best,

Helga

[Helga Velroyen]

No, the "About" section does not show "verbose logging" for me. 

This is how it looks like:

[Helga Velroyen]

I also tried what you recommended in the other post.

However, I cannot run 

LD_PRELOAD=/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 ~/opt/nrfconnect-bluetooth-low-energy/nrfconnect-bluetooth-low-energy-4.0.4-x86_64.AppImage

because I do not have a folder "nrfconnect-bluetooth-low-energy" in ~/opt

Should that be there?

I tried uninstalling and re-installing the app from the "nRF Connect For Desktop" app, but nothing like that appears in ~/opt.

Am I missing the AppImage for "Bluetooth Low Energy"? If so, how can I get it?

Thanks,

Helga

[Elfving]

I guess that was a bad suggestion from me either way, as that worked on Ubuntu 22 which is to a small degree supported, while Ubuntu 24 is not supported in any way.

I've had a talk with one of the guys in the team responsible for the app, and his response is just that it is not supported and trying to get it working is futile.

We are planning on updating to a newer tech stack for nRF Connect for Desktop, but as of now we just have this which has only been tested on a few OS. I think the reason why it is hard to get working on other systems is that the the apps relies on an older version of a dependency that has been made stand-alone. 

I have I've seen the same issue on Ubuntu 22, and another customer have seen it work on Debian 12.

Regards,

Elfving

[Helga Velroyen]

So, what was the solution for the customer that uses Ubuntu 22?

[ivan iushkov]

I faced the same issue today in Ubuntu 22. For me the followoing workaround worked:

1) Download older version of libstdc++ and extract it (it is a .deb package but the regular unzip should work fine for it). I downloaded older version here

2) run nrf connect for desktop BLE using the following command to use downloaded library instead of default one:
LD_PRELOAD=<folder_where_downloaded_file_is_unzipped>usr/lib/aarch64-linux-gnu/libstdc++.so.6 ~/opt/nrfconnect-bluetooth-low-energy/nrfconnect-bluetooth-low-energy-4.0.4-x86_64.AppImage

It is hacky but it works fine, and also this approach doesn't require downgrading the libstdc++ library in the whole system.

Also, the AppImage can be downloaded from here probably. Not sure why you don't have ~/opt/nrfconnect-bluetooth-low-energy/ subfolder. Maybe in Ubuntu 24 the folder is created somewhere else...

[Helga Velroyen]

That actually worked for me. Thanks a lot!