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At half the price and half the weight this would be kick-ass.

Light, cheap or thin: pick any one. You can spend 2x-3x as much as I paid and get a Lenovo or Fujitsu that is close to your weight requirements. Too rich for my blood.

I do not see anything about Wacom active digitizer, without which this thing is useless for drawing or taking notes. The word stylus is not even on the linked
page.

Haven't you heard? After Iphone fetish gadget sites like engadget and gizmodo and all the Apple Polishers have gone gaga for multitouch, it's become fashionable for clueless newbies to touch to get their hate on for the humble-but-useful stylus. Stylii are now basically marketing poison.

However, I can tell you mie came with a stylus and if you look at the HP sales page, there are replacement stylii for sale... Google: tm2 wacom. For more confirmation, look at the drivers on this page - Wacom confirmed there and via PC Magic and lspci. There's even an extensive new bug/patch workup for the Wacom on Lucid.

> Trojans and infected binaries cannot really be solved by sandboxing either because somebody has to set the permissions,
> and that somebody is either the OS, the malware writer, or worse, you.

I have actually suggested that the malware writer _request_ the permissions.

I'm serious. See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

It is easier to check the requested permissions for "badness" than to figure out the program.

If the permissions are from a known set of templates provided by the O/S, it is even easier for the normal user to figure out whether the program is up to no good or not, since the O/S can provide some hints.

If the permissions are custom, a 3rd party can audit them and sign them, and an administrator could allow ANY program to be run by the user, _as_long_as_ it uses certain sandbox templates, or if it uses a custom sandbox, the sandbox is signed by a set of trusted parties.

Furthermore it is easier to automate the checking of the requested sandbox for "badness", than it is to automate the checking of new unknown programs for "badness".

This scenario is analogous to solving the halting problem by having the program writer request up front how much time the program wants, and the user or O/S or "AV software" deciding whether to approve it, and if approved the O/S enforcing the approved sandbox.

of course

I don't think that's obvious. Remote file completion using scp has been working (with the correct packages) for a while now. Here's a bug report for a regression where it used to work, but then something changed and broke the behavior going from Jaunty to Karmic (Major Ubuntu releases.)

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/karmic/+source/bash-completion/+bug/449349

Hi there, I am a spatial guy so thought my 0.02 may be worth something. I am not too sure about digitising them, maybe a print shop or as suggested in other posts you could talk to your local university geography department or a government mapping agency

Once they are digital though you need to georeference them. As mentioned in the title of my post, it is easiest to use GIS to do this and you can use QGIS with relative ease. Install it using osgeo4w on windows or the ubuntu ppa for qgis. Alternatively if you have a license then use ArcGIS. If you have a map of the underlying roads for the maps you are digitising then what you do is find points on the roads and match them to points on the scanned images, this provides data for a transformation and will shift the map onto your coordinates.

What happens if I change my hardware configuration after I've already installed Ubuntu?

The same utility detects the change and if a proprietary driver is available offers do download it for you. Incidentally, it does the same thing if a new driver is detected (e.g. nVidia updates their driver).

I mean, how hard can it be to implement a clean-room version of a mysql client library and make it BSD-like licensed?

Not that hard it seems.

So ultimately my question is, does Ubuntu have as one of its goals to enable someone like me to finally make the switch to Linux?

Yes. The trouble is, if you frame it that way then Linux has to dislodge every incumbent market dominating piece of software which is well beyond the capability of Shuttleworth. I think it's actually beyond the capability of the whole open source community. Even things like Firefox which is one of the grand champions of open source only got 25% market share, the old ways sit hard.

Microsoft won't budge but the other companies, they're just looking for a business case and you'll have Adobe CS - the real thing - on Ubuntu. Of course, this is the old chicken and egg problem. Well, I think the only way out of that is not trying to win every niche. There's many, many people that need only basic software, but they're also the kind of user you can't require a degree in CS to administrate their box - those groups are almost mutually exclusive.

I don't think Shuttlworth has so many other ways to go than the one he's going, trying to polish it up so new users can use it and trying to create one big target that hopefully some commmercial companies will start to pick up on. Don't think they'll support ten different distros, it'll be like server software. If you want support, you're running our configuration. If it runs anyway, great for you but not our problem when it breaks. If you think all people will ever need is OSS, then we'll be at 1% another ten years.

I loathe Gnome personally but don't begrude people the freedom of choice. However, with Ubuntu becoming almost synonymous with Linux, do they have a responsibility to try and put out a quality KDE desktop along with a quality Gnome desktop?

Yep. Coming at this from a slightly different angle, I use fluxbox on ubuntu rather than gnome. One of the big problems in karmic is that I'm being affected by multiple new regressions that seem to arise from the lack of any serious testing on any desktop environment other than gnome. Two examples: (1) Previously, sound used to work fine for me in fluxbox. Now, sound works sometimes in Gnome, never in fluxbox. (2) This bug appears to arise because they decided to implement a new signal from the Gnome desktop to let xsplash know when it was done starting up, but nobody appears to have bothered to check what would happen in desktop environments other than Gnome, which don't implement the signal.

I understand that Gnome is the primary desktop focus of the standard version of ubuntu. But is is really that much to ask that someone at least start up the other desktop environments once to see if they work? Both of the problems above were evident to me within five minutes of upgrading from jaunty to karmic.

This is an excellent question. I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft, and I'm really dismayed by the quality of jaunty and (especially) karmic. The biggest issue is that sound, which worked for me in edgy through intrepid, started working poorly in jaunty, and is now essentially completely broken for me in karmic. I've spent a lot of time surfing ubuntuforms.org, collecting information, trying to write useful and well documented bug reports, etc. But the upshot is that there have been major, major regressions in sound for me.

Another regression that affected me after the upgrade to karmic was this one. I noticed the problem, and because it was causing me significant inconvenience I dug around in the source code and found it. As described in the bug report, there is a function called temporary_hack_for_initial_fade(). So obviously someone put a kludge in and then the kludge wasn't fixed in time for the release of karmic, so they released it anyway. This doesn't seem to speak well for the quality assurance procedures that go into a release of ubuntu.

Getting and installing the 64-bit flash plugin directly from adobe and not from the repository package fixed the non clickable flash issue for me.

Just though you might want to know. Plus there seems to be other ways to solve the problem.

Go post that reply to those posts then.

I don't blame the user, because:

1) Trying to figure out whether something is safe to run (without the source code and the full inputs) is harder than solving the halting problem.
2) Only allowing the user to run Vendor Approved software is overly and unnecessarily restrictive.

As such I have proposed to the O/S makers to do something like the following:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

Basically a program will have to declare upfront the limits of what it will be able to do (based on a set of templates). And then if the user approves, the O/S will then restrict the program to those limits.

Right now the Vista/Windows 7 UAC stuff is useless. So what if a program is signed or unsigned, it means little even to someone technically inclined- you still have no idea what the program will really do whether it's signed or not.

So I do partly blame the operating system bunch (Linux, Windows, Mac, etc) for still being stuck in the 1960s when it comes to security. After 50 years and how many billions of dollars of "R&D", and we're still stuck with primitive security systems, where if someone runs say a "tetris clone" their documents and private data end up at risk.

But most of the blame still goes to the people unleashing the malware on the users.

This is the one. It's in TFA, I thought it was in the summary or I would have linked to it in the first place.

For those who want to know: Launchpad blueprints are ideas converted in subprojects. For example, there have been thousand blueprints which while have been completed, have never been implemented.

So first - no official announcement in mailing list, no blog post, but a *blueprint* is a basis of the whole fact in this blog (which is full of ads and snags). Impressive.

https://blueprints.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/mobile-lucid-arm-webservice-for-office

Wow, first of all, it's for ARM UNE (small subvariant of Ubuntu Netbook Edition), implementation is not started yet and motivation is more clear than ad-riddened blog wrote - OO.o is simply slow on ARM. Yes, you can try to use Abiword, but I think it is not tweaked to run ARM too.

Well, my OSS project doesn't have lots of users, only some of my co-workers, but I do try to keep updated the project's site documentation and activity by fixing bugs and using the tools given to me to report all of this. If a potential user comes by, he can easily see that even for a one person project, it's alive. And yes, it's here: http://launchpad.net/mcm/

Yes, you can host your code on http://www.launchpad.net/ which is based in the UK and avoid sourceforge's horribly slow, badly designed site entirely. It was great back in the day but now the site is annoying and gets in the way of actually managing your project in favor of serving up adverts to you. Do a little test now. Go to any project on sourceforge and notice how much screen space is wasted by adverts and nonsense.

If enough people switch over then we as a global community can get rid of sourceforge which is bound by stupid copyright and patent laws. I'd like to see a company try and get Canonical to take down a project on launchpad due to a patent, ain't gonna happen.

Done for netatalk. Supposedly they're working on it for netatalk 2.1, due out maybe some time this year.

do you use Ubuntu? If so and you didn't know about it already, use: NVidia Launchpad PPA

It's gone downhill so fast it's been like a toboggan ride.

That may be an exaggeration, but I kind of agree. I've been using ubuntu since Edgy, steadily upgrading, and am now using Karmic. Starting with Jaunty, and now continuing with Karmic, I've been having multiple serious problems with sound. Karmic is also causing me several problems where they changed something and made sure it worked with Gnome, but it doesn't work properly with other WMs: 1, 2.

It's gone downhill so fast it's been like a toboggan ride.

That may be an exaggeration, but I kind of agree. I've been using ubuntu since Edgy, steadily upgrading, and am now using Karmic. Starting with Jaunty, and now continuing with Karmic, I've been having multiple serious problems with sound. Karmic is also causing me several problems where they changed something and made sure it worked with Gnome, but it doesn't work properly with other WMs: 1, 2.

NOTES: Fair's fair: the netbook's WiFi Linux driver (both O/S's) will not connect to WEP WiFi APs (WPA works fine).

That's a known bug with NetworkManager. Replace it with wicd and you should connect on the first try.

You already have to [digitally] sign a document and agree to a code of conduct in order to become an "Ubuntero", which among other minor benefits is necessary in order to get access to the PPA system.

I assume you mean to host your own PPA (Personal Package Archive); there's nothing stopping any anonymous user from downloading from existing PPAs.

You already have to [digitally] sign a document and agree to a code of conduct in order to become an "Ubuntero", which among other minor benefits is necessary in order to get access to the PPA system.

I assume you mean to host your own PPA (Personal Package Archive); there's nothing stopping any anonymous user from downloading from existing PPAs.

What does it matter that Shuttleworth finances the distro? He does not finance me, nor any of the other volunteers. Counted in hours*$ their contribution is bigger than Shuttleworth's but they (rightfully) do not get an exception in the Code. Neither should Shuttleworth or anyone else. Having a leader does not mean that person is infallible.

Developers are a picky and meticulous lot. This joke in the Code does not fall well with many, just search the web for "ubuntu code of conduct sabdfl". There is even a bug out on it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-codeofconduct/+bug/53843
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-codeofconduct/+bug/53843/comments/11

What does it matter that Shuttleworth finances the distro? He does not finance me, nor any of the other volunteers. Counted in hours*$ their contribution is bigger than Shuttleworth's but they (rightfully) do not get an exception in the Code. Neither should Shuttleworth or anyone else. Having a leader does not mean that person is infallible.

Developers are a picky and meticulous lot. This joke in the Code does not fall well with many, just search the web for "ubuntu code of conduct sabdfl". There is even a bug out on it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-codeofconduct/+bug/53843
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-codeofconduct/+bug/53843/comments/11

Andy Zebrowitz said on 2010-01-03: Actually, I've seen this happen when the resolution is incorrect -- usually too large for the monitor, so the monitor just doesn't process the signal. Unfortunately, if you can't get to any sort of graphical interface, that means your'e going to have to mess with the X config file and add a line in there that specifies your resolution.

It got removed because it went "dead or dormant"
You can read about it here : https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gspot/+bug/361175

sakila? https://launchpad.net/sakila-server
terrible name if you ask me but who cares

I just got a HTPC for me this Xmas. It's Intel Atom N330 dual core + Nvidia ION You can either build it youself or buy a system from some of the vendors. If you build youself, it's cheaper and you can get a much bigger hardrive (1TB), the pre-built systems these days usually ship with 320GB HD. But they usually got a better form factor. Mine got pefect and smooth 1080p playback. I use XBMC (xbmc.org) on ubuntu 9.10 You just need to install the lastest Nvidia driver: https://launchpad.net/~nvidia-vdpau/+archive/ppa Get youself a MCE remote.

andy zebrowitz

I use the Chromium daily dev PPA on Ubuntu Karmic and it's great. I'm using it now. I use Firefox for work browsing and Chromium for personal.

I lost data as a result of bzr not supporting history rewriting. As far as I can tell, it's still not supported.

I have never lost data that has been committed to a git repository, even though my build of git-svn occasionally segfaults on me.

Shuttleworth is one of the biggest problems with Ubuntu. His focus on "usability" has left the OS in complete disarray; while the developers are busy fixing 100 little papercuts they're shipping a release with broken DNS resolving. What is less user-friendly: a poorly labeled checkbox in the installation screen or "breaking the internet"? Canonical and Ubuntu were good in the beginning, they righted the wrongs of Debian, brought Linux closer to the desktop and then threw all that away with some really bad decisions (update notifier popup, software update policy, shipping releases with very serious bugs). Hopefully with someone new in charge Ubuntu can try and become what it used to be, given that Shuttleworth's hubris seems to be the most major bug in Ubuntu at the moment.

I use redmine, which is opensource, and free as long as you have a server for it.

If I liked bazaar, I would use launchpad.

If I wanted a payed, supported option, I'd go for Basecamp.

Frankly, I'd much rather see OpenMicroBlogging being used and promoted rather than the Twitter API. It's used in StatusNet and identi.ca and allows for seamless subscriptions between various OpenMicroBlogging-enabled sites. It's sort of like the XMPP/Jabber of microblogging.

StatusNet also supports the Twitter API, but I don't know of any clients that let me point to identi.ca instead of Twitter. I use Gwibber, though which natively supports both of them and more.

If you want apt functionality, and a free version of Chrome, and you are running Ubuntu, then you can use the PPA Chromium daily builds.

I have been running it on Kubuntu 9.10 64bits and it has been stable and very fast.

To do that, just add the repository:

# sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily
# sudo aptitude update
# sudo aptitude install chromium-browser

If you are running older versions of Ubuntu, then go to the Chromium PPA page for instructions.

AdThwart is a much better ad blocking extension for Chrome than Adblock+. AdThwart uses the EasyList from Firefox's Adblock Plus, and it seems to block everything pretty well. It's totally unconfigurable but since EasyList works very well that's fine by me. AdThwart is at https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb

On Ubuntu Hardy, I find that this version works well: 4.0.267.0~svn20091208r34029-0ubuntu1~ucd1~hardy (from the Ubuntu Chromium PPA). Once you find a version that works well it's best to hold it in your package manager (e.g. "wajig hold" on Ubuntu or Debian) so that you don't get a daily update to a version that crashes on launch, as happened to me recently. Generally Chromium is very impressive for an alpha browser (I'm using the dev channel on Ubuntu via the PPA at https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa ) - very fast, and leaves maximum screen area for content.

Set up the PPA on my Ubuntu box in sources.list back in Sept/Oct

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

Current version shows 4.0.266.0 (Ubuntu build 33943)

The virtual desktop in X is up to the driver to implement, it may or may not be software. In the case of the drivers for the intel 915/945 chips, there's a hardware limitation that prevents the virtual screen size from being greater than 2048x2048 (try it yourself). If I'm reading the bug reports right, newer drivers may work around this.

http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2009-July/046683.html
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/383345

Since switching to Ubuntu, I have had no need to install weird things off the internet. I just go to Ubuntu's software repositories, and I can download thousands and thousands of pieces of software that have been tested just for my operating system. No malware, no viruses, no attention seeking software that wants to embed a brand in my brain, no nagging to buy additional products, nothing.

On the other hand, this makes you susceptible to the "Google syndrome" - if it's not in your repositories, then it doesn't exist. That's a fairly limited world view, don't you think?

Also, while we're speaking about Ubuntu... I'm glad that they finally found the time to update the package for Eclipse to 3.5 in 9.10, but for the previous 5 (!) major Ubuntu releases it was stuck at 3.2 (so in 9.04, it was 2 versions behind upstream out of the box). The result was that virtually everyone who needed Eclipse on Ubuntu ignored the repositories, and downloaded and installed the newer version manually. Exactly the same way they do on Windows.

And the reason why there was no updated package? Well, apparently, the old maintainer was gone, and package was complicated enough to work on that no-one else stepped up to maintain it. It highlights certain deficiencies in "central repository maintained by distro" model, don't you think?

At the same time, Ubuntu certainly doesn't preclude one from installing packages semi-manually. Heck, if you click on a link to a .deb file in the browser, it will prompt you if you want to install it right then! So convincing a clueless user using Ubuntu to install something from a random web page isn't really any more difficult than convincing the same user using Windows. Two reasons why you don't see it actually happening are that, 1) Linux users are generally more knowledgeable, and 2) writing such malware for Linux specifically is simply not worth the effort.

Your statement may have been true a few years ago, but not anymore. Ever since the driver certifications I had sound cards not working in XP SP2 and above anymore. I actually had to run Linux to get my soundcard to work again.

Good for you. Meanwhile, it seems that all Linux distros shipping today have an audio bug that doesn't have a known fix (there are some fixes that worked for some people, but no single one that works for anybody). Note that, while the bug I've linked is for Ubuntu, the problem also exists at least in Debian Lenny, Fedora 12, OpenSUSE 11.2, and Mandrake 2010. Note that Ubuntu bug tracker claims they've fixed it on some of the dupes for that bug (but not others) - it's false. They've released with it still there for many people.

I have a post-Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 user interface

What's that supposed to mean?

an OS that let's me compile a piece of software with a single command, instead of having to learn that piece of shit called Visual Studio.

You do realize that you can compile a piece of software with a single command using Windows SDK as well, right? C/C++ compiler is "cl", and for make you have a choice of "nmake" and "msbuild" - and, of course, there's always MinGW.

Speaking of VS - it's not perfect, but I dare say it's not for a Linux desktop user to boast of good C++ IDEs. Until Qt released Creator recently, everything that was there was either severely feature-crippled, or highly unstable. And Creator is still somewhere on par with VS6 (1998) in terms of code completion quality.

But please don't bash an OS that is light-years ahead of Windows, and miles ahead of Mac OS.

You'll have to explain the "miles" first, I'm afraid. For all the OSes you've listed, there are areas in which one is ahead of another, but Linux is most assuredly not ahead on all counts. No Time Machine as in OS X (and that similar feature tucked away in Windows), no transactional FS as in Vista/7, etc.

Google Chrome (the browser) actually does run on Linux. It even has flash and java support now.

I added the chromium-daily repository, and everything is stable and works fine.

https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

By the way, I still use firefox for the most part. Adblock plus is nice.

The Gimp is in Ubuntu main (see https://edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gimp )

Ubuntu wants the installation to fit on a single CD. Most other distros, including Debian, distribute on DVDs, but unless you receive a hardcopy from somewhere, it can be problematic to download if you have a slow or unstable Internet connection, and basically, on the DVD image you download lots of software you don't need or want. CDs are much more manageable, and once the system has been installed, you can carry on customizing your system.

With the growing number of drivers and kernel modules, occasionally software needs to go from the CD image, and here, as in writing, the rule is: "kill your darlings." Nobody *wants* to get rid of The Gimp (like others have said, it's a seminal application) but taking a hard look at the facts, you need to admit that The Gimp is a program you need to spend lots of time with to be able to use efficiently, and users who want it can get it faster than you can say: "in a few clicks." (Well, almost :-))

OTOH, a photo app is valuable to have on the install image when you have to win the hearts and minds of users coming from other OSes... it's all a part of fixing Ubuntu bug #1.

There was a wonderful bug in ubuntu where it wouldn't print on tuesdays. It would generate a postscript file, which includes the date, but a faulty entry for file-type detection caused postscript on tuesday to be interpreted as some kind of erlang file... which obviously didn't print very well :)

http://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file/+bug/248619

No one was ignorant.

Except the distributions. Who somehow got the impression that KDE 3.x was no longer supported, that they had to upgrade to KDE 4, and that any bitching about KDE4's premature inclusion was just a "pet peeve".

How come that distributors were so much out of phase with the KDE developpers? Shouldn't KDE 4's alpha status have been communicated much more clearly to the distributors? Especially since more than one distribution (at least Fedora and Kubuntu) made the same "mistake"?

Have they fixed the maddening inability of plasma-widget-network-manager to connect to a hidden wireless ESSID? Maybe this is just a Kubuntu problem, but since 9.04 (7 months ago) the KDE network manager has had issues off and on connecting to non-visible ESSIDs, even after explicitly giving it the name. It's especially frustrating because GNOME's network manager has no such issue, so it's not a driver problem.

KDE 4 wasn't following POSIX standards for writing to a HDD.

You sir, are an idiot.

Read the bug report.

I'll give you some quotes:

After a clean reboot pretty much any file written to by any application (during the previous boot) was 0 bytes.
For example Plasma and some of the KDE core config files were reset. Also some of my MySQL databases were killed...

-- Bogdan Gribincea

The files that were zeroed when my machine hardlocked I'd imagine were the ones that were in use; my desktop env is Gnome and I was running a game in Wine. Wine's reg files which it would have had open were wiped and also my Gnome terminal settings were wiped.

-- Ben Hodgetts

I'm using 2.6.28-8-generic and a crash just zeroed out a _load_ of important files in my git repository which I'd recently rebased a patch series in.

-- Peter Cliffton

Ack... had a power outage and ran into this one today too. Several configuration files from programs I was running ended up trashed. This also explains the corruption I've seen of my BOINC/SETI files when hard-rebooting in past weeks.

-- 3vi1

I did mix up 30 minutes and 30 seconds. But that's just an example of tons of different applications, databases, source files, Gnome settings and whatever cleaned out by this BUG. Why you keep denying it I don't know, but at least you earned youself a foe rating for it.

It's coming soon. It is even in one of their svn branches

If you use ubuntu you can test it out

https://launchpad.net/~henningpingel/+archive/xbmc

I won't comment on the other entries since I haven't played around with them yet but I will say this: The primary advantage PyCI has over, say, LuCI, Tomato, DD-WRT, and X-WRT is that configuration screens in PyCI are infinitely configurable. When I say, "inifinitely configurable" I mean that all forms that can be dynamic are dynamic. For example, in Tomato and LuCI if you want to configure DNS you get two fields to enter that information (primary and secondary). In PyCI you can add as many as you want. There's examples of this all over the spectrum of configurable options.

Also, PyCI supports many features that the existing interfaces do not which is sort of the whole point of the contest. As another example, PyCI doesn't just let you configure firewall rules. It lets you configure your firewall rules and then see exactly which iptables command will be executed as the result of your changes.

My personal favorite unique feature of PyCI is the quake-style terminal. Even if PyCI doesn't have a configuration interface for something you can always just hit the ESC key to pull down a full terminal just as if you SSH'd into your router. It even works with full-screen apps like vi. I wrote a standalone version of it called Escape From The Web that can be downloaded here. It uses the Tornado framework instead of CherryPy (among some other differences) but from the user's perspective it is pretty much the same.

There's a whole lot of stuff included with PyCI that isn't covered in detail in the wiki. I plan to put up a downloadable x86 Qemu image with PyCI pre-installed for people to play with soon.

A full GUI root account is a terrible idea

Of course, which is why you can't log in as root in any display manager in Mandriva. However, you can log in as root on the console, or su to root. However, the more insecure "blanket sudo to root to the first user" is *not* present by default. What *is* present however in some cases, are "restricted" versions of some tools, e.g. the rurpmi version of urpmi, which restricts what you can do with packages, specifically so you can safely give users access to installing software themselves. Most GUI configuration tools are handled by consolehelper (in 2010.0 this might now be the *kit replacement).

Oh, and the reason why I left Mandrake for SuSE (and later Ubuntu) in the first place: RPM Hell. Mandrake is only slightly better than SuSE (and moreso than Fedora) at this, but I don't want to fight with my package manager because of bizarre internal consistency issues that prevent upgrading packages, or adding third-party software. I've never had this problem on Ubuntu or Debian or Elive or any other .deb-based distribution.

And I haven't had this on Mandrake/Mandriva since 7.0, which was the first release to ship urpmi, before apt was in a stable release of Debian.

Ubuntu also has a method of installing patent-encumbered software, and it's built-in, not an external repository

So, Ubuntu is violating DMCA?

Even if you don't do that, any time you try to play an MP3 or WMV, etc, it will ask you if you want to download and install the codec required, on the spot, just warning you that it's patent-encumbered.

MP3 playback is available out-the-box, the codeina thingy is also available by default.

How is that not *better* than your solution in Mandriva?

Can you play AMR audio?

Anyway, this is not a technical decision, Mandriva has a policy of not being involved in the distribution of any patent-infringing software. If software patents disappeared, it would take a few hours to get the packages into Mandriva.

Hmm... Let's see:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/410343

My whole point is them monetizing through SPYWARE. I understand you don't enter a cc #, that doesn't mean they aren't tracking and selling user info.

I had already gone through this extension's source at one point in the past, admittedly a long time ago and I did not really understand the complaints of how it was acting as spyware (as some people complained in #kubuntu at the time), so if you do know how, feel free to inform me.

Here is a response as to what it is:
http://www.asoftsite.org/s9y/archives/162-What-is-this-Multisearch-thing-in-my-Firefox-about.html - contained in the information that bug was marked a duplicate of.

Your sound system response is prototypical of the exact problem. "Works for me".. do you have every possible configuration of sound card?

No, but I have 31 of the most common chipsets which are all fully supported. In the past I had a lot of problems with Intel HDA on various Linux distributions, but not had any since the last LTS release.

I hear a lot of non-sense from people saying X doesn't work on Linux and I'm using at that moment they state it and all it was, was installing the package normally to stupid stories about how Google doesn't render correctly in Firefox on Linux but works on windows. I've noticed people who are being honest are able to backup their information with a lot more than a what is contained in a tiny bug report that doesn't even provide any information on how it is what they claim it is.

The devs having exactly that attitude is why Ubuntu as a distro has moved into the crap pile in my house.

I'm not a dev, nor a helper on Slashdot. I'm a poster and if you don't even provide any information to back up your cases, I will go with my own knowledge and experience to help asses the information you are stating.