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He doesn't need the money, his company is small in terms of staff and he set forth a goal which is not to compete directly with Microsoft but a more altruistic level by addressing the computing needs of people in general.

A bilingual post in the spirit of the thread.

Lingua latina tamen vivit, etiam in mondo computatri. Opus Ubuntu unam sectionem habet pro translatione in latinam. Ecce hic! Ea non est mortua. Multi in mundo linguam latinam discunt, e.g. in plurimis universitatibus, aut in schola secunda (AP Latin?). Etiam, quisque studentus in Italia discere linguam latinam debes. Ea lingua universalis est, quidem hodie, et paene ubique ab aliquo locuta est.

The Latin language yet lives, even in the computer world. The Ubuntu project has a section for translating into Latin, you can find it here. Latin is not dead. Many in the world study Latin, for example in most universities, or in secondary school (AP Latin?). Furthermore, each student in Italy must learn Latin. It is a universal language, even today, and is spoken, by someone, almost everywhere.

A bilingual post in the spirit of the thread.

Lingua latina tamen vivit, etiam in mondo computatri. Opus Ubuntu unam sectionem habet pro translatione in latinam. Ecce hic! Ea non est mortua. Multi in mundo linguam latinam discunt, e.g. in plurimis universitatibus, aut in schola secunda (AP Latin?). Etiam, quisque studentus in Italia discere linguam latinam debes. Ea lingua universalis est, quidem hodie, et paene ubique ab aliquo locuta est.

The Latin language yet lives, even in the computer world. The Ubuntu project has a section for translating into Latin, you can find it here. Latin is not dead. Many in the world study Latin, for example in most universities, or in secondary school (AP Latin?). Furthermore, each student in Italy must learn Latin. It is a universal language, even today, and is spoken, by someone, almost everywhere.

After installing Ubuntu on my laptop I found out about an interesting bug which sometimes stops the realtime clock. When that happens the machine won't even POST and the only way to recover is by opening up the laptop and removing a coin cell battery for a bit. Some people returned their laptops to Dell for service. I read somewhere that someone had their motherboard replaced. Fortunately it never happened to me.

You should not forget bug#1.

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

...until that best tool for the job forces an upgrade/remove features/breaks compatibility with other stuff that you need. Then you realize that, shit, you should have stuck with the FOSS tools to begin with.

When would this happen in the real world? Am I just theorizing? Try iTunes's upgrade from 6 to 7.

unless you have a dual monitor setup which makes displayconfig-restore.py crash on start, see https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/97507
I switched from w2k to kubuntu a month ago and I must say there are still thousands of little things which annoy or limit my productivity

To me, it is pretty obvious that Ubuntu, which has Bug #1 as top priority, can not cast itself to the public eye as some piece of free software which seems or tries to emulate the Windows system with which its stars are crossed, by design. My hat is off to Mark Shuttleworth, who once again, shows great leadership.

that they fix the bug where you can't disconnect USB drives in Feisty using unmount or eject. Otherwise end users will get the impression that Mark is trying to avoid: that is Ubuntu will look like a cheap Windows.... https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gnome-vo lume-manager/+bug/63090

.. will it run as good as 7.04 currently does on laptops ?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-ser ver/+bug/89853
(laptops with ATI x series cards currently broken)

End Users do post about OS flaws. They get answers like this one. As long as hardware snobs out there keep telling the rest of us to "get a better computer" whenever the Open Source community hasn't come up with drivers for economy hardware, then flaws are not the fault of the end user.

If a program crashes, it asks you if you want to send an error report to Microsoft. Press 'send' to send one. If it's a known problem, it'll tell you.

If you're beta-testing Windows, a quick Google gives http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/sentiments/d efault.mspx as a feedback form. I imagine other beta products have their own feedback ways (e.g. Office 2007 had Send a Smile / Send a Frown).

Otherwise... it seems to vary from product to product. Windows Home Server has a dedicated suggestion forum; and pretty much every product has a developer blog.

If that's not direct enough, I can personally recommend another OS with more direct feedback methods...

I think the difference between KDE and Gnome can be explained sufficiently well by two screenshots, taken from random places on the web.

Copying a CD with KDE

Copying a CD with Gnome

I don't see much explanatory value in talk about "power users". That I am an expert on speech recognisers does not make me want to manipulate zillions of settings when I'm burning a CD. I have better things to do. KDE is not the desktop of choice for "power users", but for people with too much time on their hands.

Come to think of it, that's exactly the psychological profile of the average Slashdot reader!

I think the difference between KDE and Gnome can be explained sufficiently well by two screenshots, taken from random places on the web.

Copying a CD with KDE

Copying a CD with Gnome

I don't see much explanatory value in talk about "power users". That I am an expert on speech recognisers does not make me want to manipulate zillions of settings when I'm burning a CD. I have better things to do. KDE is not the desktop of choice for "power users", but for people with too much time on their hands.

Come to think of it, that's exactly the psychological profile of the average Slashdot reader!

Just google my name, go ahead, do it.
And don't forget to click on the first result.

rt2500 support is not broken, its just that network manager does not know how to talk to it
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-so urce-2.6.20/+bug/37120
you can still use it fine with the old networking tools

System -> Administration -> Networking

choose the rt2500 card
click properies.
disable roaming.
set your network name, and put in any WEP key you might need
for most network setups choose the DHCP configuration.

There's a new note in that thread that there's a work around available at the end of this thread

the nvidia-glx-new package supports the 8xxx cards. There's a long story behind why it's called new, and it's all right here:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-re stricted-modules-2.6.20/+bug/96430

Don't blame launchpad for the funkiness, they had to work around nvidia's move of de-supporting a huge amount of cards that are still currently very popular.

there is a show stopper bug in either the kernel or driver for the ata2 interface.

it's confirmed now that on many laptops the kernel has to restart the ata2 interface intermittently and thereby lock up your system for up to 30 seconds at a time essentially rendering your laptop useless.

stay on lts or edgy for the time being until this bug is fixed:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-so urce-2.6.20/+bug/107271

At present Ubuntu is encouraging people to ignore the problem of video-driver support, to purchase broken crap from nvidia and to penalise Intel by not selecting their boards and integrated cards.

That's so not true

you mean like this one ?

http://librarian.launchpad.net/7329776/Screenshot. png

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debconf/ +bug/106505

you mean like this one ?

http://librarian.launchpad.net/7329776/Screenshot. png

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/debconf/ +bug/106505

I know people have been trolling for years about drag and drop in linux. The thing is that it is still not working as reliably as in Windows. Make no mistake. I use Ubuntu and i know what i'm talking about...

Drag and drop doesn't work reliably. In Dapper (2 versions of Ubuntu back), when you tried to unzip something (from fileroller to nautilus) by drag and drop, you had to hold during the "drop" for as long as fileroller needed to decompress the files. If fileroller didn't have sufficient time to decompress then nothing happening.

In feisty (the current beta Ubuntu) drag and drop from fileroller (the WinZip of Ubuntu) to nautilus (the Explorer of Ubuntu) doesn't work at all due to incompatible Drag&Drop protocols (fileroller uses XDS whereas nautilus does not).

For the nonbelievers:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/file-rol ler/+bug/13199
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171655

It is a joke to suggest that linux is desktop ready, when such simple things do not work. I manage fine because i'm more of a command line person. My parents would not. They would just try to drag and drop the damn file inside the zip to where ever they need it....

Seconded. I think it's also important to consider just how much Shuttleworth and Canonical have given, not only for Ubuntu but for Debian as well.

To characterise what they've done as 'ripping off someone else's work' does no justice whatsoever to the immense number of hours they've invested in:

• Integrating a compositing window manager that out-blings Aero by a country mile;
• Creating an entirely new system start-up service to replace the aging init.d
• Investing huge amounts of effort in improving the package management GUI to a point where anyone can use it;
• Creating themes that - like them or not - are better organised, cleaner and simpler to use than anything that's come before;
• Providing top-flight technical support services, both free and paid;
• Creating one of the most dynamic and energetic user communities in FOSS today;
• Spending millions preparing an educational version of the OS, and paying to roll it out into African schools;
• And dozens of other things that I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

Rest assured, this is not the work of a rip-off artist. If it is, then I wish someone would 'rip-off' my work early and often! 8^)

Insightful? Shuttleworth is independently wealthy from a previous internet business, and his mission from day one has been a mass Linux desktop. Don't believe me? Look at Bug #1 in Ubuntu "Microsoft has a majority market share". Ubuntu isn't market-driven. Shuttleworth has said that he'll support the distribution himself out-of-pocket if need be.

I don't think those concerns are valid, nor do they reflect much knowledge of the situation.

• OOTB? "Out of the Blue"? Sorry,cannot help here.
• Zeroconf: yup
• nVidia: yup. Note: the nVidia driver was always included in Ubuntu, it was just not totally foolproof to enable it. Now it is.
• mp3: yup
• Video formats: yup. Note: not in all the players, just in gstreamer (works great). xine-backend users need to follow a few simple steps
• All layers configured right: first of all, I never had the problems with mplayer and xine you described. However, it is pretty unreasonable to demand form Ubuntu to have all players configured correctly. Ubuntu has a list of supported software, you can demand that this works. For unsupported stuff, file bug reports and contribute fixes

• OOTB? "Out of the Blue"? Sorry,cannot help here.
• Zeroconf: yup
• nVidia: yup. Note: the nVidia driver was always included in Ubuntu, it was just not totally foolproof to enable it. Now it is.
• mp3: yup
• Video formats: yup. Note: not in all the players, just in gstreamer (works great). xine-backend users need to follow a few simple steps
• All layers configured right: first of all, I never had the problems with mplayer and xine you described. However, it is pretty unreasonable to demand form Ubuntu to have all players configured correctly. Ubuntu has a list of supported software, you can demand that this works. For unsupported stuff, file bug reports and contribute fixes

• OOTB? "Out of the Blue"? Sorry,cannot help here.
• Zeroconf: yup
• nVidia: yup. Note: the nVidia driver was always included in Ubuntu, it was just not totally foolproof to enable it. Now it is.
• mp3: yup
• Video formats: yup. Note: not in all the players, just in gstreamer (works great). xine-backend users need to follow a few simple steps
• All layers configured right: first of all, I never had the problems with mplayer and xine you described. However, it is pretty unreasonable to demand form Ubuntu to have all players configured correctly. Ubuntu has a list of supported software, you can demand that this works. For unsupported stuff, file bug reports and contribute fixes

• OOTB? "Out of the Blue"? Sorry,cannot help here.
• Zeroconf: yup
• nVidia: yup. Note: the nVidia driver was always included in Ubuntu, it was just not totally foolproof to enable it. Now it is.
• mp3: yup
• Video formats: yup. Note: not in all the players, just in gstreamer (works great). xine-backend users need to follow a few simple steps
• All layers configured right: first of all, I never had the problems with mplayer and xine you described. However, it is pretty unreasonable to demand form Ubuntu to have all players configured correctly. Ubuntu has a list of supported software, you can demand that this works. For unsupported stuff, file bug reports and contribute fixes

Why they're not pulling in a newer version is beyond me.

Maybe they don't know about the issue? You should file a bug in Launchpad

Honestly, my biggest complaint now is that WPA and connecting to weird RADIUS servers run by universities and the like is still a royal pain. I tried Network-Manager (a Gnome applet) and it did all kinds of bad stuff to my system (loopback never came up), and didn't help me connect to encrypted networks at all. But, they're working on it.

network-manager will be fully integrated in 7.04 (Feisty), see the spec here.
Until then (while on 6.10 (Edgy) or earlier), see instructions here

etch ships with CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH_CACHED (experimental) enabled in the kernel. This breaks the multipath route behavior in iproute. As the google search shows, it is wreaking havoc with anyone using multipath and dual-wan systems. Those who upgraded this morning to the new stable may be in for a ride. This is a known and documented issue but cannot be found in debian's bug tracking system. This issue is not unique to Debian but it should not have passed through the release engineering for the new stable release.

The feature spec notes this as well. Might be a good page for monitoring ...

Ubuntu Hungry Hippo should be nice, but if you want to fix bug number #1 ( https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 ) and overthrough Microsoft, you'll have t to wait for:
Ubuntu Cuthroat Cthulhu

when all who are called throw down the "Linux for Humans" (whatever that means) facade and bow down to our new overlord.

https://launchpad.net/bugs/89581

Err, what? It's pretty easy to get in Linux and has been for years, but not everyone uses it because it is only found in packages for more recent versions (however, SSP has been available for about eight years, n^x for about seven).

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.sear chtext=alc+sound

Have you tried Feisty? Have you submitted a bug on Ubuntu's bug tracker? Just curious.

They are working on it. I don't know if it will be in this release, but it is on the way. https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/bull et-proof-x/

Ubuntu will not be ready for any decent work while it still has bugs like the infamous overheating bug. I mean, I love Kubuntu and I adopted it as my main OS but seriously, it still suffers from a showstopping overheating bug which is almost 2 years old. I mean, what good is an OS for if it simply can't cope with any mildly CPU-intensive application (i.e., compiling, encoding sound files, running any 3D application, etc...) before hanging, crashing and endangering the hardware itself?

I've got a Fuji F30 (which does not have a mass storage mode). I had to manually add some lines to /etc/udev/rules.d/45-libgphoto2.rules to get the permissions set properly. Said camera worked just fine with Dapper. Of course the rules file is not empty in Edgy, but it's certainly missing some well known USB IDs.

See also the bug report: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gphoto2/+bug/ 6602

These are pretty stupid regressions to be making, if only because they're so trivial to fix to boot. I certainly don't hold out a lot of hope for Feisty.

You realize they can't support other distributions right? They can't even ensure that they'll work properly.

Would you seriously pay them $890 for a laptop with a version of linux that passes 97% of tests and they'll show you a list of the 3% of the tests that fail so you can decide if you want to figure out and fix them or not on your own.

I paid more than that for a laptop that was 0% guaranteed to work with Linux.

I recognize that not everybody is up for that brand of adventure, but y'know what? If Dell gave me a test suite to run, I'd gladly hunt down what problems I can in the 3%. I get a community-helping project to chew on, Ubuntu (eventually) gets a "compatible with Dell laptops" endorsement, and Dell gets a new product line for free*.

* Yes, the initial development of said test suite might be expensive, but they probably have to do that anyway even if they only support one distro. Each successive distro that works on passing said tests costs Dell nothing, but they get to say, "See! We support all kinds of Linux!"

You want to create specs for users and ,at the same time, able to manage all the specs in a software-driven way? See how it is done for Ubuntu's Feisty Fawn's specification: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/feisty/+specs The nice part of it is the use cases and peer review. Brilliant! No need to be so detailed like programming codes and such. Be simple for your peace of mind....

sorry, forgot to put in the link: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+milestone/herd-5

https://launchpad.net/envy

This one? Might give Linux another try then. ;)

Yeah, they broke the Broadcom drivers in 2.6.20-8 (they work in 2.6.20-6). They're supposedly fixed in 2.6.20-9, but that doesn't work for me (I'm on an iBook too) because of this bug. Just boot into 2.6.20-6 and you'll be grand, they'll sort this out soon - there's already been a fix committed.

If you want to upgrade to it on release day, I'd recommend using bittorrent to get the ISO (faster this way) and then doing an apt-get dist-upgrade with that CD-ROM as a new apt repository.

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

Astonishingly asinine, and a perfect example of losing one's focus. Chase the dream, not the competition.

On a positive note, most of the other distros using launchpad had the sense to set the bug to "Rejected".

So we get more ways to easier install proprietary stuff on that OS that was originally proposing to 'support free software'. Sigh.

You seem confused. Let me refresh your memory:

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

I don't know where you got the idea that Ubuntu cares about software freedom. Ubuntu exists solely to tear market share from Microsoft any way it can.

Don't try to force your FOSS views on people who have no knowledge or care about the situation; you'll only entrench them further into Windows. If an ordinary end-user asks you to recommend a Linux distribution, you should absolutely recommend Ubuntu. Ubuntu is the only distribution that actually tries to Just Work, and it does a damn good job of it.