Slashdot Mirror

You should try one of the mirrors. I cut my download time down from 4 hours to 45 minutes. I like that they are classified by location and speed. Find them here. Source.

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.

Your sound system response is prototypical of the exact problem. "Works for me".. do you have every possible configuration of sound card? Do you use Ubuntu to output a optical spdif signal to your home theater? The devs having exactly that attitude is why Ubuntu as a distro has moved into the crap pile in my house.

I used Gentoo exclusively for several years before switching to Ubuntu. Though Arch's package management may be better than Gentoo's and certainly has the advantage over Debian's in easily creating packages from scratch, I am still firmly convinced that Debian/Ubuntu are better for most people most of the time. Since Debian has been around forever and far more people use it and its derivatives than Gentoo or Arch, there are packages for just about everything already.

I install packages from Ubuntu PPAs all the time. When there's not a binary in a PPA, I can almost always find an Ubuntu or Debian source package that compiles with little trouble and I can modify if needed. I don't need to carefully maintain different Ubuntu build environments since I can just upload a source package to my PPA and binary packages for several architectures and releases can be built automatically, allowing me not only to use it on all of my machines, but also share it with any other Ubuntu users.

As others have already pointed out, the main advantage of a release-oriented distribution like Ubuntu is that I can count on very little breaking as long as I don't upgrade to the next release. I just upgraded my laptop to Karmic, which turned out to be a mistake since it now freezes at random points. I think the instability is related to the new 2.6.31 kernel, but I'm not sure and Karmic's Xorg doesn't work right with the older 2.6.28 kernel.

Though this is a bad regression, if I would have tried the Karmic LiveCD first, I would have seen the problem and known not to upgrade the entire system yet. I also can now reinstall Jaunty and restore my /home from backup and I know the system will work just as well as it did before. If I'd been using a rolling distribution like Gentoo or Arch, reverting to and staying at a known working configuration wouldn't be nearly as straightforward.

When I was using Gentoo, I had to spend a lot of time just keeping up with package updates, most of which I didn't need. However, I couldn't easily choose to just get security updates, as I can using an Ubuntu LTS release for example.

HOW THE BUGS ARE HANDLED!!

you mean like bug #1 on ubuntu launchpad?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

i almost didn't believe you...but it's true: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unr-meta/+bug/443298 however i will be upgrading to karmic after (release date + 1 month) to take advantage of the improved intel graphics drivers and full screen flash without flicker (at least when i try the karmic livecd it works well)

Have a look at this gem. Because of IPv6 DNS lookups going nowhere, and the thing waiting for them to time-out, you get 2-4 second delays on every name resolution. Happy browsing!

In practice, people are not amused.

What more, the bug is 2 months old - and it shipped in Karmic, still rated "undecided", and not assigned to anyone. Really?

I also had a chuckle out of this comment to the bug:

I agree it is a pretty serious issue for many and by no way mean to imply windows is anything but a well polished turd.

It's kinda sad that the person feels obliged to "apologize" for pointing out a serious deficiency like that.

On a minor side, there's issue with font smoothing settings in Firefox. Workaround? Edit ~/.fonts.conf - wonderful, just wonderful. When did I last see a /. comment claiming that, no, you really no longer need to edit config files in Linux by hand?

Sorry for being somewhat bitter... despite my background, I was looking forward to this release - not the least because it finally has Eclipse 3.5 in repositories (it used to be 3.2 in 3 previous major releases, lagging 3 major versions behind mainstream...). And straight away I run into crap like this, all while a bunch of /. muppets keep sticking fingers in their ears and going, "it works for me, PBCAK, lalala, can't hear you!".

Have a look at this gem. Because of IPv6 DNS lookups going nowhere, and the thing waiting for them to time-out, you get 2-4 second delays on every name resolution. Happy browsing!

In practice, people are not amused.

What more, the bug is 2 months old - and it shipped in Karmic, still rated "undecided", and not assigned to anyone. Really?

I also had a chuckle out of this comment to the bug:

I agree it is a pretty serious issue for many and by no way mean to imply windows is anything but a well polished turd.

It's kinda sad that the person feels obliged to "apologize" for pointing out a serious deficiency like that.

On a minor side, there's issue with font smoothing settings in Firefox. Workaround? Edit ~/.fonts.conf - wonderful, just wonderful. When did I last see a /. comment claiming that, no, you really no longer need to edit config files in Linux by hand?

Sorry for being somewhat bitter... despite my background, I was looking forward to this release - not the least because it finally has Eclipse 3.5 in repositories (it used to be 3.2 in 3 previous major releases, lagging 3 major versions behind mainstream...). And straight away I run into crap like this, all while a bunch of /. muppets keep sticking fingers in their ears and going, "it works for me, PBCAK, lalala, can't hear you!".

There is a new fix for it. Check it out: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/flashplugin-nonfree/+bug/410407/comments/143

Enjoy!

Bluetooth worked in Hardy & intrepid for me. Stopped and started again in Intrepid. Then failed.

Worked for about a week in Jaunty.

Still dead in karmic - hci timeout

Latest bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bluez/+bug/453885

Original bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/268502

Bluetooth worked in Hardy & intrepid for me. Stopped and started again in Intrepid. Then failed.

Worked for about a week in Jaunty.

Still dead in karmic - hci timeout

Latest bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/bluez/+bug/453885

Original bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/268502

I haven't had any of those problems yet. Although, I have seen my laptop screen's brightness suddenly drop while I was typing, only to happen again a few hours after I reset it to where it was.

Currently there is a notification sitting on my screen, saying that the xserver running on this machine is screwed up, pointing to a random blog entry.

I've also run into another problem with some of the GUI admin tools.

None of the mentioned things affected my setup: Dell XPS with AMD64 and nVidia, but I had other various issues.

1. The wired card ceased to be "managed". The fix was easy, but the reason will remain a mystery.
2. "Popping" sounds could be heard. This is a very minor bug with a very easy fix.
3. Quake Live became a terrible dog for FPS, and the problem was traced to its interference with compiz. Since QL is still in beta, it is hard to say whose fault it is. The workaround (by me :) is OK.
4. Where is the Services wizard? It got nuked! To be sure, it's not a bug, but a serious usability issue. Users have to either grok System V scripts (so I am OK) or use Synaptic when they want to, say, disable/enable sshd.
5. The login screen is fugly and the wizard for it is gone. Or could as well be gone.

Altogether, this was a rather painless experience for me, but if you hate ironing out bugs, I would recommend waiting for a few weeks before upgrading from stable. On the other hand, if you are doing a new installation, 9.10 is probably a better choice, as it basically works.

P.S.: God, I hate it when I press a wrong button and Firefox navigates away, which causes me to loose my notes.Slashdot should open the input form on a separate page.

NetworkManager is a piece of shit w.r.t wireless. I've read every fucking thread out on various mailing lists and the author simply says "It's the driver's fault" despite the same problem happening across the board to multiple users of different cards.

The biggest problem is the stupid fucking background scanning it does. What happens is that when NetworkManager gets a wild hair up its ass and decides it time to scan for more networks, your wireless NIC will disassociate from the current AP until the scanning is over. God forbid there happens to be one shitty AP somewhere at the edge of your range and it takes too long to respond. Your connection is toast and you have to re-associate but meanwhile you've just lost connectivity for 2 minutes. Hope you didn't need that download anytime soon or that you remembered to screen that SSH session to a production server. Any machine I use that has wireless, is running WICD now instead of NetworkManager ( http://wicd.sourceforge.net/ )

I love Ubuntu. Honestly the only problems I've ever had were with the switch to PulseAudio. I grew out of tinkering with my distros a LONG time ago. I need my machine to work so I can work. I did a fresh install of Karmic and moved my home partition stuff around this time. The ONLY problem I had was with PulseAudio and my Audigy card ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/467732 ).

Coming in late to the conversation, but what the hey.

The biggest thing I've noticed so far is that DNS lookup in the default install is CRAZY slow for me. I've read some posts about blacklisting the ip6 module or changing the name resolving order, but I'd rather not use a temporary workaround that's incompatible with whatever fix they eventually choose to implement. The bug is here, by the way: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/417757

Other than that, I've noticed instability in Flash, some general UI unresponsiveness, and a (now fixed) bug in the update manager that would throw up a kernel oops message.

It sure is pretty, though.

If I try hitting Fn+F2 to turn my WiFi on and off the system crashes HARD. Millions of 9xx model eeepcs have been sold--all of them with the Ralink rt2860 WiFi card. Some 10xx models of eeepcs are also reporting this issue. Considering this is an issue that has been known since JULY and the Canonical developers made the choice to release known buggy software that causes kernel panics rather than accept an alteration in their precious schedule...I think people have a right to be annoyed.

The attitude seems to be 'let upstream (Debian) fix it' while Canonical pisses around with themes and icon changes--well if I have to wait for Debian to fix the issues, why not simply run Debian?

--bornagainpenguin

Speaking of Ubuntu and sound - I've hit an annoying bug in Karmic where if you have two audio-out jacks, one for speakers and another for headphones, and you plug in headphones, your speakers will keep playing. The desired effect is to have sound play via speakers normally, and via headphones when they're plugged in (and then back via speakers when headphones are unplugged). This is a known confirmed bug. There are a lot of recipes floating around, most having to do with mucking around in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf, with specific changes depending on your audio chipset; but, judging by the forums, they don't cover all possible cases, so this is still not fully fixed as of today.

Experience on a Lenovo R61i:

Upgrade went, well mediocre. Upgrade failed partially into installation of packages. Had to run some (since forgotten) dpkg command to clean up. Restarted upgrade. This time it completed.

After installation was complete upon successful boot everything appeared to work for the most part with the exception of X. Frame rate while sitting at the desktop with no apps running and compiz disabled was terrible... around 5-20 fps. All sorts of corruption / artifacts in the ui. While trying to get online to check launchpad, system hard locked.

Restored my image of Jaunty and all is well.

This was probably the issue I had with X. To be fair it's an upstream.

Went from Jaunty to Karmic on a Dell Mini 9 (both were the Netbook Remix editions) and was greeted with no wireless and no microphone in Skype. The former is a documented issue with the Broadcom drivers and has a fairly straightforward workaround if you're within reach of a wired ethernet connection. The latter appears to be a problem with Skype 2.1.0.47 (current version in Medibuntu for Karmic, and a "beta" no less) and PulseAudio. So far, the workarounds for the latter appear to be to downgrade Skype or remove Pulse.

The two biggest problems I've had personally are https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/403339 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/465916

Which in the grand scheme of things are pretty minor. The first one is really annoying if you play WoW in wine, because you have to manually turn off keyboard repeat :/

Other than that, I've upgraded 3 machines without problems. My parallels VM upgraded to karmic doesn't detect any drives unless I use the older kernel, but I'm 90% sure that that's not a bug in ubuntu.

But *man* that xorg bug is annoying.

The two biggest problems I've had personally are https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/403339 and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups/+bug/465916

Which in the grand scheme of things are pretty minor. The first one is really annoying if you play WoW in wine, because you have to manually turn off keyboard repeat :/

Other than that, I've upgraded 3 machines without problems. My parallels VM upgraded to karmic doesn't detect any drives unless I use the older kernel, but I'm 90% sure that that's not a bug in ubuntu.

But *man* that xorg bug is annoying.

Some observations from my brief experience

Updating in general went completely pain-free. Well, except for the servers time-outing when I tried to update on the day of the release, so I had to postpone one day.

Regressions:

Audio occasionally pops; due to some power saving stuff, solution: comment out a single line: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2009-May/008239.html

Fonts were ugly in the beginning, turned out to be due to an old ~/.Xresources I had lying around that made my apps use the old X core fonts instead of fontconfig. No idea why it previously worked fine on 9.04. But nothing I can blame ubuntu devs on really.

Bugs:

The new perf tool coming with the 2.6.31+ kernels is missing: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/428159

Some OpenGL apps such as google earth flicker when using a compositing desktop. This is apparently a fundamental problem with the existing DRI architecture. Solution is to switch to DRI2, whenever that is ready. Again, not Ubuntu's fault really.

Improvements:

KDE 4.3.x instead of 4.2.x. Boatloads of improvements and bugfixes. And of course, also other updated apps, such as firefox 3.5, emacs 23.1 etc.

Open source radeon drivers can run OpenGL stuff with my X1550 without crashing (9.04 hard locked the machine within minutes).

They still don't seem to have fixed the PHP5 zlib bug that stops Wordpress auto-upgrade from working: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/php5/+bug/451405 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/php5/+bug/439407

They still don't seem to have fixed the PHP5 zlib bug that stops Wordpress auto-upgrade from working: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/php5/+bug/451405 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/php5/+bug/439407

already forgotten about this one? -> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.5/+bug/410343/

If you actually read the whole thread, you will notice that there are 2 other users reporting it as well:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/453579/comments/80

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/453579/comments/86

There is also this (on a newer kernel). It is the sort of necessary debugging, but that at the same time doesn't quite encourage me to migrate my data systems to ext4 at this point. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14354#c90

If you actually read the whole thread, you will notice that there are 2 other users reporting it as well:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/453579/comments/80

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/453579/comments/86

There is also this (on a newer kernel). It is the sort of necessary debugging, but that at the same time doesn't quite encourage me to migrate my data systems to ext4 at this point. http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14354#c90

To be fair, reading the referenced bug report it looks like the corruption has only being reported by one user. Apparently no one else has reproduced it, and faulty memory has not been ruled out as a suspected cause.

It is prudent to mention in the release notes, but doesn't quite seem worth holding up the release for.

Sounds like a great blueprint to be written.

Amazingly, if you click on the release notes link all the way down at the bottom of the "cool new features" page, and read about 2/3 of the way down that page, oh yeah by the way:

Possible corruption of large files with ext4 filesystem

There have been some reports of data corruption with fresh (not upgraded) ext4 file systems using the Ubuntu 9.10 kernel when writing to large files (over 512MB). The issue is under investigation, and if confirmed will be resolved in a post-release update. Users who routinely manipulate large files may want to consider using ext3 file systems until this issue is resolved. (453579)

What... the... fuck... are these morons thinking. They make ext4 their default filesystem, and release to the world with a bug like this open. I don't care whether they charge for this, give it away for free, or pay people to use it. This is not a release, it's an ugly prank. A giant fuck you to the entire world. "Hey, here's an awesome free OS! Just kidding it eats your files, lulz!!!!"

How hard is it to put a giant warning label ("MAY EAT YOUR FILES, TBD") on the front page? Why not just say, whoops the release will be late, sorry? What is it about their ego that makes it more important than peoples' data? You don't have to do work for free, just don't fucking trick people!

Between the increasing mess of 8.10 and 9.04, and this debacle, I am just losing all respect for Canonical.

Also, btw, the whole story is wrong and 9.10 is not available for download yet. Thank god.

Ext4 in Ubuntu 9.10 is specially problematic, as there are reports of corruption when writing large files:
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releasenotes/910#Switching%20to%20ext4%20requires%20manually%20updating%20grub

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/453579

Only closed binary blobs will benefit, which IMHO is not something worth putting effort towards helping

Either you don't care about gaming on Linux (in which case you're entitled to your opinion), or you want to make all video games into free software (in which case I'd like to know how you expect the developers to get paid). Which is the case?

As for the end user, she should just use the package manager of her distro and find whatever she needs.

Or find a program, fail to find it in the distribution's package manager, file a request for packaging in the distribution's bug tracker, and let the request linger for years.

Such as bug 452518 (saving MS Word format documents using Open Office KDE shipped with Kubuntu 9.10 can result in corrupted files).
However, the list of great features planned for this release is amazing! Ubuntu is no longer "Debian with a graphical installer and brown theme", it has become a pretty interesting distro on its own merit.

Really? Your system sucks then because on mine it works fine! Have you submitted a backtrace for this issue? Even a bug report?

If you haven't then the bug doesn't exist, plain and simple.

I did, against *Buntu, I even used the PPA builds of PA, still crashed. I have the full crash dumps available on the bug: See: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/424551 This basically happened the same in Fedora also.

1) its CPU usage is reasonable

Well, on my system (4 year old core2duo) it sits between 0 and 1% even when playing...

Seems o be much higher on mu dual core2dual not even 1 year old.

Not heard of any problems here but is there a bug report about this?

3) It does not crash so much causing me no end of pain with multiple apps requiring audio.

I'm not experiencing any problems. It's been pretty stable for me for quite some time? What version have you been using?

Well, my typical use is like this: 1) KDE + audio, VirtualBox + audio, Second Life + audio.. PA keels over.

If you even had a tiny clue about things, you'd realise how ridiculous this statement is. OSS is old news. The API is not going to help us move forward. Have you even seen some of the stuff from the latest Linux Plumbers conference? Paul "Jack/Ardour" Davis summary is probably the best one I've read about why OSS is not sufficient and these are decisions that were made years ago... where on earth do people get this "OSSv4 causes world peace and solves every problem ever" option from? They've clearly never actually *looked* at things for themselves that's for sure.

Regardless, ALSA moves ever so slowly in the lack of resources. That's not to blame the developers at all. I've logged several bugs on this stupid Intel-HDA card and its PCM lack of capture. That wouldn't change with ALSA or OSSv4 if this is a hardware limitation.

We've had enough crap in the Linux Audio subsystem for so long, it's time to do the right thing and chunk the whole shit out.

Yeah because that kind of code writes itself right? All we need to do is get everyone to catch a fairy at the bottom of their garden and then stuff it into their CD drive... the code will be there by morning!

There are probably about four people working on linux sound as a paid job... Lennart, Takashi, Jaroslav and Paul... Maybe a few other too, but typically in very specific disciplines/hardware, but certainly none of them are going to start working on OSS that's for sure. So where is this magical work going to come from?

People have to write it...

I'll accept more pain if we get it right, finally.

This is us getting it right and this is that pain.

You might be, but, I remain unconvinced for now. My sense of PA is the dumbed down interface and lack of functionality that is missing. It's bad enough the microphone on this intel-HDA doesn't work properly by me having to adjust _3_ properties in order for someone to hear me and even then its either too loud or too soft. I don't see how PA will fix this problem.

There seems to be big difference in the way bugs and issues are recorded.

OSS: "If you do X, Y happens. This shouldn't happen" Followed by a long discussion between developers and users to track down and solve the problem.e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox-3.0/+bug/269656

Microsoft: "X is broken. That's just the way it is." Followed by a form to let them know just how much this pisses you off. e.g. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/102888

Ubuntu 9.04 OpenOffice PPA

Linux/OS X launcher:

https://launchpad.net/pylotro

They have already killed mysql 6.0 "MySQL 6.0 was not developed beyond Alpha status and new releases have not been made for some time, so the manual has been withdrawn as well."

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/6.0/en/index.html

Wrong. We have NOT 'killed' 6.0, but it not going to be the focus of our development for a while, and we won't do any more official 6.0 releases for some time to come. But we HAVE moved it to the back burner, so to speak.

If you really want 6.0, you can get it right here:

https://code.launchpad.net/~mysql/mysql-server/mysql-6.0-codebase

No guarantees right now as to how well it'll build and run on any given day; I think I last built it last Tuesday or Wednesday, and it seemed to do okay, but of course YMMV. That being said, go get the code and knock yourself out.

In the meantime, we're backporting what we think are the best bits of 6.0 to 5.X.

so what is next ?

You'll find some answers to that question here...

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-next-series-plans.html

And here...

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/

And what's this? The latest release, from less than a week ago:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.4/en/news-5-4-3.html

That's the clone-off date, BTW. Binaries should be available here

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.4.html

in a few days.

5.x on the death row

I think that's a bit of a stretch. Why don't you see what we say about it on the site?

http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/lifecycle/

NB: We have a choice between (a) honouring the policies on this page and (b) breaking contacts with paying customers.

Can you guess which of these we're more likely to do?

maybe is time to move to postgresql , firebird ...

That's one of the reasons why it's called Free Software -- you're absolutely free to move to something else if you like, and we wish you every success with it if you choose to do so.

Maybe that's a more sensible proposal.

But what's not so sensible is it's taken about 7 years since I tried to get people to do something about it:

http://markmail.org/message/pgcka6wlxgbfyep7
http://www.mail-archive.com/mozilla-security@mozilla.org/msg01448.html

That's a pretty long time. Oh well, maybe we'll see a brake pedal eventually. Like I said, I don't care how it looks as long as it works and is easy to use.

Heh at least I'm not a patent troll. In my experience ideas are easy - getting stuff implemented is the hard part. I'm happy if people just improved stuff faster.

p.s. Maybe it'll be another 7 years before someone actually implements something like this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693
Too bad after all the years and alleged billions all we got was UAC from Microsoft, and maybe a few sandboxed browsers.

• When there are security updates, Update Manager will open and show them (plus any other available updates) within a day.
• When there are non-security updates, Update Manager will open and show them *one week* after it was last opened (whether it was last opened manually or automatically, and regardless of whether updates were actually installed then).
• When there are no available updates, Update Manager will not open automatically at all.

Friends' Ubuntu installations were rarely updated due to the limited attention received by the little icon. With the new [minimised] update window, the machines updated weekly.

It all comes down to visibility.

Cheers.

D'oh. Let's try that url again. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/update-notifier/+bug/332945

Amen to that. Fortunately, there is a godsend for Ubuntu users: Amarok 1.4 series PPA. You just add it to your package sources and install "amarok14". Thank you Bogdan Butnaru.

Well my user agent string right now is: (Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.212.0 Safari/532.0), which says I'm running the latest Chrome very nicely on my Linux box.

If you are using Ubuntu, I suggest you give this PPA a try: https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa

It's daily builds of Chromium. I've been running it now for a week, and it has not crashed on me a single time. There is a x86 version, as well as a AMD64 version, and the 64-bit version is now true 64 bit, i.e., it does not depend on 32 bit libs.

It's stable and nearly feature complete. Supports all plugins (including Flash) out of the box, if they are installed on your machine. It imported all my settings and profile from Firefox. I like its original look, but it can now also use native Gtk themes of your system, so that it meshes really well with the rest of your system. It implements the one-process-per-tab architecture, and uses a *lot* less memory than Firefox. In fact, it is astonishingly more responsive and less memory-hungry than FF.

There are a few things left, for example printing doesn't work on it yet. Once they implement printing, I'm sure they will roll out the Beta.

Google is also working on an extension framework, so things as AdBlock will become a reality soon.

Give it a try, it's very impressive.

Ubuntu Chromium Daily Build, currently very usable.

It's called apt. It's already widely deployed in Debian and Ubuntu, and has been for a long time. The problem is solved.

And for completness:

• on openSUSE it's "zypper".
• on some embed Linux distros it's "ipkg" and it's derivate (like opkg).

What proportion of third party vendors distribute their software using apt ?

There is :

• a great dealy of 3rd party opensource producers who provide repositories for their softwares. Not only binaries, not only packages, but full repositories which can be added to apt/zypper/whatever and get automatically updated
• there's also a great deal of additional external repositories - such as for example "PPA" for ubuntu, Debian multimedia, openSUSE's repositories, and Packman (which is multi-platform, but mostly concentrates on multimedia packages which can't be legally distributed with openSUSE)
• whenever possible people try to package 3rd party commercial application in these repositories - you can find closed source drivers, flash, acrobat, microsoft's font. The only limit is whether the author authorise re-packing and re-distribution. Even then, sometime packagers manage to go around such limitation by making packages which are actually updating scripts (ms fonts works that way)

So, in short, a great deal of software in addition to what came on you CD can already get updated today.

Not only that, but to make the whole experience more user friendly, some like openSUSE have developed method where a single link on a web page can be processed by the package manager and, once given the necessary privilege, with 1 webpage clic, you get automatically the correct repository added and the necessary packages selected.

Meanwhile, with microsoft you get 1 central system (windows updates) which is used for the OS and maybe for a couple of other microsoft products (MS-Office, Visual Studio) as long as the user selects the appropriate service (microsoft updates). Then you have a couple of other software which implements their own incompatible updates tracking (Firefox) of which some are really cumbersome (Acrobat). Virtually everything else is left to rot.

That said, personally I think the icon theme in Gnome for OpenSolaris is pretty nice looking.

You can easily have that in Ubuntu too!

What Linux needs is a user-friendliness consultant who is tasked to find all the problems that make the OS difficult for average people to navigate.

Interesting you should mention this as Ubuntu launch their One Hundred Paper Cuts project.

I've often thought it would be nice to have a version of Linux that had locked down settings, leaving relatively little choice, but guaranteeing everything to work smoothly.

It is an issue with the Intel drivers. Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) shipped with kernel 2.6.28, in which the Intel made some major changes in the graphics system. The Intel drivers suffered a performance regression with this kernel due to some miscommunication with xorg, most visible when viewing Flash, is also seen with other video playback, such as DVD. Intel has addressed the issue by releasing a fix to its drivers and to xorg. This issue should be fixed as of kernel 2.6.30.

Here is a description the issue and some workarounds:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1130582

Here is the Ubuntu Launchpad bug report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/314928

I'd answered yes, but one doesn't control the fsync behavior of every application running on his/her system and the OS/file system can take a lot of time (even tens of seconds or more) before deciding to commit changes to the hard disk. Furthermore, a fsync may take seconds to complete and disaster can strike at any time.

There was quite a commotion about those matters when somebody filed a data loss bug against the new Linux ext4 file system in January 2009. It turned out that ext3 commits changes at least every 5 seconds and ext4 does it less often. Some applications that got lucky with Linux crashes on ext3 exposed their poor design when running on ext4. Comments #45 and #54 in the linked page are quite explanatory.

By the way that was a sloppy application coding problem (if you want your data safe on HD you fsync and wait as long as it takes to write them down) but they eventually issued some patches to the file system code to mitigate it.

The problem's only gotten worse. I have a ~month-old 13" MacBook Pro. The thing gets ~8 hours (seriously) with my normal use (light PDF reading and web site browsing) under OS X. I actually hate OS X, so I installed Ubuntu. Gave up after the majority of the hardware (trackpad, sound, ... ) didn't work. Yes, I spent a fair amount of time testing workarounds and commenting on bug reports and finally gave up.

It'll be some time before I try Ubuntu again on my MBP, but if any Ubuntu devs out there want to save frustration for other MBP users, your expertise is sorely needed in this area.

I've personally experienced issues with my laptop BIOS. It works properly in Windows, but a lot of the ACPI functions just flat out don't work in Linux. This is due to a compiler that lets the code compile with errors (Mainly functions that don't return a value when they should). This allows the BIOS programmers to be lazy, and write half assed power functions that don't work properly.

You can fix a lot of these issues by following the instructions in one of the links below to decompile that portion of the BIOS, and recompile it using the Intel compiler. It isn't easy, and certainly isn't something an user should ever have to do. It did fix a lot of the power issues with my HP laptop though (Running hot, not booting on battery power unless a key was pressed, hibernation).

See
http://www.osnews.com/thread?230516
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1036051
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/272247?comments=all


In this instance, you can blame MS's poor compiler for Linux's poor battery life.