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Global menu: It was sort of OK, I guess, for the original mac.

Now we have 24" and 30" screens. You can have apps in all corners of the screen, and you're supposed to mouse all the way up to the top left to access a menu?

Create one problem, and then start applying bandages everywhere: Mark's answer? Create menuless apps.

Newsflash: Not every application can be as simple as an iPhone 99 cent doodad.

And say goodbye to discoverability. Say hello to the old-style right-click menus of Gimp and Dia that everyone always complained about.

Oh, and that "document-centric" interface that hipsters are always talking about? How do you (clearly) discern which to which window a menu applies?

The farther he goes from being a usable alternative to Windows (as opposed to Bizarro Windows), the farther Ubuntu goes from being able to fix Bug #1 ("Microsoft has a majority market share").

Car analogy: It's as if the Japanese, during the 70s, hadn't presented a car with 4 wheels, steering wheel, gas + brake pedals, but some sort of weird contraption with the driver in the back or something.

https://launchpad.net/~cheleb/+archive/blender-svn

That's a PPA for Blender SVN (which I've been using since like Blender 2.5 Alpha 1, and Blender's generally been 100% usable).
If you just want the release package, pick one from that PPA's previous builds, here. (Make sure you pick the right architecture, version, and target Ubuntu version.)

https://launchpad.net/~cheleb/+archive/blender-svn

That's a PPA for Blender SVN (which I've been using since like Blender 2.5 Alpha 1, and Blender's generally been 100% usable).
If you just want the release package, pick one from that PPA's previous builds, here. (Make sure you pick the right architecture, version, and target Ubuntu version.)

I'll head over and flag "Fix Released" on Bug #1 then...

No, it was removed so that when they enabled OSSp, everything would be shunted through that. But they never got around to enabling it, so they broke all OSS apps by accident. Cite: Ubuntu Bug 579300. Here's their rationale for disabling OSS:

we're investigating using OSSp to shunt all apps attempting to use the older, in-kernel OSS API to use pulse instead. To do so, we'll need to disable all forms of OSS (native and emulated)

Hey, look! That's not about disabling OSS at all. That's about changing the way OSS support is provided. Sure, it's completely braindead to use Pulseaudio for anything, but that's not the issue here, which is whether OSS support was supposed to be turned off. It wasn't, or it wouldn't have been conditional on enabling OSSp.

Now, they made this change back in May of 2010, for the next release (10.10), assuming by then OSSp would be enabled. Witness the flood of complaints (same URL) when 10.10 came out, however, and OSSp not only wasn't enabled by default, but didn't even compile! The best part is watching the people on the bug claim it was by design, and not by accident. ("OSS is deprecated!" Nope, OSS3 is deprecated. Entirely different. OSS was not and is not deprecated. Good job, guys!)

Way to break everyone's audio on accident, then refuse to do anything about it, claiming it was on purpose. I think that about sums up Ubuntu in a nutshell.

I agree there's no stable driver support for the 560Ti, this was a little disconcerting the first time I booted up to a ChunkyVision resolution with no dual screen.

In the case of Ubuntu, adding a PPA to my repository list was enough to get the drivers.

While that's not ideal, I'm sure they'll be rolled into the next release.

It has already happened with nvida: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers/+bug/660596

If you're referring to the problem with Empathy, the solution was posted in the bug report here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/empathy/+bug/486508/comments/11

I just had that issue, you can modify /usr/share/empathy/empathy-chat-window.ui and change the line that says:
<accelerator key="W" modifiers="GDK_CONTROL_MASK"/>

to

<accelerator key="Escape" />

and ask for forgiveness to the gods that decided that would be a sin, cheers

I am not so sure this is a universally bad idea. Ubuntu does something similar which, while of course being irrelevant for the software itself, sets a certain goal or mindset for the project. When writing a software for a non-profit we filed "x does not like it" (with x being the least, ahem, mentally flexible and most problematic user in the organisation) as first bug and marked it as release blocker. So in order to get the software out to the users we were forced to interact with the "worst" of them and really reflect on this person's feedback, which resulted in an application that everyone actually wanted to use.

For a big commercial product such a nontechnical bug may be unproductive, but for the right team it may actually add a motivation or direct focus at something that usually would be an afterthought at best.

I have to chuckle at this:

I know this is counterintuitive, but there are days I really miss the challenge (and the ensuing celebration) of old-school Linux. Back in the day, getting Linux installed gave many users reason to shout their own variation of “Hoorah” to the clouds.

The challenge is there, if you venture out of in-kernel drivers and supported install scenarios. Yesterday I spent three hours trying to get Linux set up on my new HP Pavilion dm1z -- and I consider myself a competent Linux user.

It took me a little while to set up LVM with the root filesystem managed by LVM. Documentation for configuring GRUB for LVM isn't great, and in some places on the web is outright wrong. Fine, got that. Next, the wireless card is unsupported. To get it to work, you must get the driver from the manufacturer (who fortunately advertises Linux support), then apply patches to it from other sources to get the driver to compile with my kernel version. None of this is documented in one place -- different forums have various snippets that inch me forward. Believe me, I shouted "Hoorah" once I finally spilled enough sweat to get it to work. (After I got this to work, I wrote my own step-by-step instructions to save others the pain.)

Once I got past the wireless issues, I started X and determined that the Synaptics touchpad is misconfigured -- the hardware is touch-sensitive on the physical buttons, so pressing a touchpad button also moves the mouse. The issue appears to be fixed, but it hasn't made it into the version of xf86-input-synaptics that Gentoo has. I had to clone the git repo of that driver, build it myself, and manually set up the rule that masks that area of the touchpad. And even now, it still doesn't work correctly. Now I don't move the mouse when I click, but I also cannot click and drag -- once I click, the cursor is fixed. Now this Linux user is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Challenges still abound, even on the most modern Linux kernel and distributions... just dare to venture out of the entrenched and supported hardware.

I miss not having 42 daemons running in the background to do stuff that could simply be a library or utility loaded/run when needed.

I miss having the init system being a robust, straight-forward process of calling shell scripts in sequence.

I miss only needing to reboot for kernel updates.

I miss having one sound subsystem that never worked, rather than countless sound daemons which never work.

I miss having my immediately-after-logon process list fit in a single 80x25 terminal window.

I miss not having everything complain that DBUS isn't running.

I miss the Unix philosophy.

It seems like Linux is just as good as MS Windows these days. Too bad. I liked it when Linux was an improvement over MS Windows.

SSDs (such as the one in this study) are quite capable of examining the filesystem stored on the drive, independently, and the concept of 'dutifully' and ignorantly maintaining deleted data goes out of the window as a result.

Is there a list of SSDs that do this? I want to be sure I never accidentally buy one, or even get misled by marketing material based on such a terrifying 'optimisation'.

I already got burned with a Corsair Flash Voyager USB stick whose controller would slow down to the point of timing out out if you modified the pre-formatted partition table (this bug). Annoying, but at least it's not trashing parts of the disk because it thinks it's seen an NTFS partition.

I'm guessing you're referring to this bug: iwlagn degrades quickly during normal wifi session which affects a number of Intel cards in the 5000 series.

I understood that the problem was that the firmware was broken on a recent kernel update, and they are waiting for new firmware from Intel, currently being tested.

If you had the same kernel version in Debian then you'd have the same issue. I've stuck with 10.04, which is kind-of the same as sticking with Debian stable.

Uninstall banshee and install any of the other players if you don't like it. The mp3 purchase thingie is fairly small and non-intrusive in any case.

Or... Uninstall banshee & reinstall banshee (the one the Banshee devs maintain, instead of the Canonical devs).

I don't know if the Banshee-Team PPA for Ubuntu will have the Hijacked affiliate link or not, but you could always just compile & install it from source.

If have one of these problems also.

I'm not sure if this is your distro's bug, but one of mine involves Ubuntu's network-manager over WPAand I can barely remain connected since maverick; prior to that, there were serious problems in just handshaking.

At the time you posted, I was halfway through test-driving the recent KDE 4.6 after dumping Fedora back in 2009 or so. I still had to use my WPA-free network. Back in 2005 the problem was that distros didn't support your wireless card; laptops were fairly new at luring devs to support 'em out of the box. It seems wifi support on Linux is in a perpetual beta, akin to sounds issues that still sometimes resurface after 15 years of being an issue. Intel is working to release microcode to resolve some of the AGN problems.

HP2663 colour inkjet, to the left of my laptop, great quality, speed and economy under Windows (pity about the 150MB+ Windows driver package), but under Linux the job goes off to the printer and never emerges; and

Congratulations, you have found an old, and likely invalid, Ubuntu bug report and misspelled the name of printer in it:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/hplip/+bug/599956

Epson CX4300 3-in-1, to the right of my laptop.

Another success for googling:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1659498

You don't even have those printers. You just google for "ubuntu printer problem".

I do have some concerns over this Gnome/Unity fork. Not just how it will effect Gnome but whether Canonical and Ubuntu can handle a significant fork. I am fairly certain bugs like this are a product of the fork, and I wonder who is going to fix them. Canonical has trouble getting good bug reports for packages like cairo, poppler and evince upstream, never mind patching them. I can think of a number of examples, but is the aforementioned bug which was almost certainly probably caused by the fork going to be fixed before 11.04 is released? It is not the only bug caused by the fork either. Who is going to fix these? The fork is small now and these should be easy to fix, who is going to fix them as the fork gets bigger, and Gnome and Unity diverge even more? On the other hand, it's conceivable that Unity will be so awesome, that developers will flock to it, and Gnome shell will to some extent wither away. There are different perspectives, different problems and different possibilities for all of these things. I can tell you right now though that the Unity stuff is breaking stuff in Ubuntu's Gnome, and it is staying broken. Stuff that the Gnome developers will not be fixing either. We'll see what happens...

I do have some concerns over this Gnome/Unity fork. Not just how it will effect Gnome but whether Canonical and Ubuntu can handle a significant fork. I am fairly certain bugs like this are a product of the fork, and I wonder who is going to fix them. Canonical has trouble getting good bug reports for packages like cairo, poppler and evince upstream, never mind patching them. I can think of a number of examples, but is the aforementioned bug which was almost certainly probably caused by the fork going to be fixed before 11.04 is released? It is not the only bug caused by the fork either. Who is going to fix these? The fork is small now and these should be easy to fix, who is going to fix them as the fork gets bigger, and Gnome and Unity diverge even more? On the other hand, it's conceivable that Unity will be so awesome, that developers will flock to it, and Gnome shell will to some extent wither away. There are different perspectives, different problems and different possibilities for all of these things. I can tell you right now though that the Unity stuff is breaking stuff in Ubuntu's Gnome, and it is staying broken. Stuff that the Gnome developers will not be fixing either. We'll see what happens...

There is some truth in that I suspect.

I got the shits with Ubuntu when they went from FSpot to Shotwell with no migration path. I have a large amount of data that means a lot to me personally and all of a sudden it's simply deprecated. (FSpot is still installable but bugs that render it useless simply don't get fixed).

Changing window managers, colour schemes etc is one thing but abandoning software that looks after things that people have significant personal investment in is a recipe for justified discontent.

Seeing as I would have to re-import all my photos into Shotwell anyway I decided to buy an iMac and have them all tucked safely away in iPhoto instead.

I still have my Ubuntu box and will continue to follow future releases but I'm not sure I will trust it with anything important until it demonstrates that transitioning user data to new releases is looked after well. I like the sometimes experimental nature of Ubuntu but it needs to temper that with supporting users through any change.

Used to be Ubuntu was the big Linux hero, the shining knight that would drive Linux onto every desktop and kick bad old Windows to the curb. But now Ubuntu is the Bad Linux. What's going on...

Ubuntu was hailed as the distro which had everyone excited that FINALLY, Windows would have some decent competition from Linux such that Linux might actually achieve double-digit desktop percentage use. That was, after all, its prime goal: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1

After 6 years, Ubuntu has failed in this goal. It's certainly brought a lot more attention to Linux on the desktop (it was enough for me to make the switch at least), however in terms of developing a more mainstream effect on the desktop computing world - nothing much has happened. Linux is still mostly unknown when it comes to desktop systems, at least with overall market use. The goal has not been achieved, and most likely won't be achieved by the time mobile platforms/cloud operating systems outrank traditional desktop OS's.

People got disillusioned, that's all.

Sure, they are GPL, but the GP said "given the patent policies of many GNU/Linux distributors". He wasn't referring to licenses. Patents. Patent-encumbered GPL code is not considered "free software" and can't be included in many distros, including Debian and (with key exceptions) Ubuntu.

The version of FFmpeg included with Debian/Ubuntu, for example, has been specifically modified to remove H.264 support.

Do video decoding layers for Linux even support codecs installed by one user for that user as opposed to codecs installed by root for all users?

Why does it matter? It "just works".

When you install Ubuntu, you don't get AVC because it's patented. Instead, to watch an AVC video in Totem for the first time, you have to connect to the Internet,* open Software Center, authenticate with sudo privileges, install gstreamer-plugins-ugly, and then affirm that you don't live in a country with AVC patents. You have to have someone with sudo access present for this.

* Should be obvious, but there's actually a feature request for being able to queue up packages in Software Center for installation the next time Update Manager runs.

Have a look in this bug report for information on how to turn off the discrete graphics card: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xorg-server/+bug/312756

• It's non-rolling, so for 6 months at a time (or longer, if you want) things don't change. Everybody knows changes can break things, and this way I can deal with possible breakage once or twice a year, instead of at any instant. This makes Ubuntu better for me than Arch.
• The releases are rapid enough. With releases every 6 months, I get fresh dose of the latest and greatest at a pleasent frequency. Debian's two-year cycle doesn't give me this.
• It's Debian compatible. Whenever I need a super-new version of some package, I can pull it from Debian Sid.

Objectively, I wouldn't consider myself in Ubuntu's main target group, but I really, really like it (despite stupid decisions all the time, and horrible, disastrous bugs such as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mountall/+bug/616287).

This post here:
https://lists.launchpad.net/coapp-developers/msg00757.html
suggests that efforts are being made to convince VeriSign to provide cheap/free certificates for open source projects.
Wont help if you are a proprietary company unwilling to open source the drivers but for "free hardware" developers it sounds like a good thing.

A company with professionals should be vetting software and should be telling users what software should and should not be able to run.

IMO, the software should be saying what type of sandbox it wants upfront. From a finite manageable set of sandbox templates.

The software could also instead request a custom sandbox, but a "custom sandbox and app pair" need to be signed by a trusted party. Either the OS vendor, or someone else with their cert installed (e.g. Corporate IT).

I proposed something like this to Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

Rather than solve something harder than the halting problem (you often don't have the full inputs to the program), you just get the programmers to declare upfront what access the programs need, and if declared OK, the OS enforces the sandboxes.

See this bug which has made the last 3-4 releases of Ubuntu necessary to reboot daily like Windows ME:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/131094

As for whether compatible libs are installed this is solved by the way shared objects are handled, those with compatible api's and functionality tend to have the same name, those that don't get a new revision

And when the revision that a given app requires is newer than the version that was current when some popular distro froze, that causes trouble. For example, a lot of dedicated servers leased from providers such as Go Daddy will be running 8.04 for quite a while, and depending on PHP 5.3 would exclude 8.04 until this bug is fixed.

go to the main ubuntu page, click 'download ubuntu' do you see any mention of a dvd at all?

Not directly, but if you're interested in CDs, the first official dealer that I looked at also offers a DVD. From ubuntu.com, I click "Try Ubuntu today", scroll down and click "CDs", scroll down to official dealers in the United States, click On Disk, and click Ubuntu 10.10 CD or DVD on the front page.

Any distro that is limited to 700mb install iso is gimped by default, and with my usual setup would require gigabytes of yum/apt-get downloads.

Every user is different and wants to do different things with a PC. These usually need different packages: my GB of extra stuff differs from your GB of extra stuff.

Maybe it changed since I last installed it, but I had to extract the files to /opt/firefox, changing permissions so te directory is writable by regular users (for automatic updates), create some symlinks, hunt down where the "open source flash" plugin is so I could have "Adobe Flash" etc.

A bit harder than just double clicking on an downloaded .exe and next->next->...->finish.

I'm not sure what steps are involved, but it looks like Mozilla currently provides a .tar.bz2 for Firefox. If you unzip it, it is all there, so you can just run it straight from the directory. I guess installing it would be harder and not for "normal users" which I suppose means it's easier to install Firefox on Windows than on Linux, assuming that Firefox isn't included in the Linux distro's repository (which it almost always is...)

But that isn't a problem with Linux. It's a problem with the way Mozilla packaged it. They could have provided a .deb package, which would install with a double click. Failing that, they could have provided an executable file which installs Firefox manually, just like the Windows version. There is nothing inherently special about Windows that allows installer programs where Linux does not.

And again, it is more difficult to do than just double click a downloaded .exe or .zip. For example - do you know a repository where Firefox is?

Well yeah ... in Ubuntu it is installed as the default web browser, and automatically updated. If you don't want the official Ubuntu one, and want a bleeding edge version, you can google "Firefox PPA" which takes you to Launchpad where you can install the Mozilla daily build PPA.

My argument is in the very common case ("it is Debian-approved"), installing software in Linux is a total no-brainer, and much more secure than the Windows way, and it will keep automatically updated. Otherwise, in the case where the provider has done as much work packaging it as they have on Windows, it will be no harder to install on Linux than on Windows. Obviously, if the software provider has done a poorer job packaging than they did on Windows (as Mozilla seem to have), your mileage may vary.

Claiming no OS today allows you to run an application that way is just a bit of friendly trolling.

I think he still has a point because: How does Joe Public easily use "sandbox" for an arbitrary program he just downloaded and have the program actually work if the program is actually safe...

The people who can easily figure out 1) and 2) typically need sandboxes less than Joe Sixpack :).

I have actually proposed this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

Just because there's SELinux and AppArmor doesn't mean much, they're the equivalent of security doors, locks, walls and safes. They are the building blocks, someone has to build a few default rooms for people to run stuff in, and ones which are actually secure.

I have seen an Ubuntu default AppArmor template for Firefox that really doesn't prevent a pwned firefox instance from accessing the user's documents - it only blacklists access to specific areas, it doesn't whitelist.

p.s. do you have a link to the sandbox(8) man page? I can't seem to find it.

Such drastic change! I have seen this happen on numerous systems and I just change the elevator to "deadline" and poof! The problem is gone. See this discussion for some details. The CFQ scheduler is great for a Linux server running a database, but it completely sucks for desktop or any server used to write large files to.

I see that the bug entry you referred to contains measurements from early 2010, at which point Ubuntu was using v2.6.31-ish kernels IIRC. (and that's the kernel version that is being referred to in the bug entry as well.)

A lot of work has gone into this area in the past 1-2 years, and v2.6.33 is the first kernel version where you should see the improvements. Slashdot reported on that controversy as well.

If you can still reproduce interactivity problems during large file copies with CFQ on v2.6.36 (and it goes away when you switch the IO scheduler to deadline), please report it to linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org so that it can be fixed ASAP. (You can also mail me directly, i'll forward it to the right list and people.)

Thanks,

Ingo

almost certainly mlocate: even though it runs at -c3, there are cases where it still sucks pretty hard:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mlocate/+bug/362809
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/findutils/+bug/332790

for the worst-case scenario of running a linux vm on a windows host AND having the host fs mounted in the correct place, (ie /mnt/ rather than /media/), this can definitely put some serious hurt on a machine.

almost certainly mlocate: even though it runs at -c3, there are cases where it still sucks pretty hard:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mlocate/+bug/362809
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/findutils/+bug/332790

for the worst-case scenario of running a linux vm on a windows host AND having the host fs mounted in the correct place, (ie /mnt/ rather than /media/), this can definitely put some serious hurt on a machine.

Is that megabyte or megabit/s? Shouldn't matter, though, since even 10 megabyte/s should not saturate the disk. I guess doing random read/writes that way could do it, but that shouldn't be an issue with a torrent app. When I was verifying that torrent for the previous post, iotop reported transmission reading in data at 60 to 70 mbyte/s. The 1.3 mbyte/s down at which my connection usually tops out at have no effect on the system.

If you need to use the app again, I'd recommend adding the transmission PPA repository and getting the most recent version (currently 2.11, Ubuntu 10.10 ships with 2.04: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:transmissionbt/ppa && sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Probably this:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/131094

It's the first thing I thought, and somebody posted to it that it hit /.

I had been wondering about this myself, for some reason I was under the impression that the BFS was no longer being maintained.

It turns out there is an up-to-date package for Ubuntu (I'm running 10.10) as well: http://launchpad.net/~chogydan/+archive/ppa

I thought I'd try it out as the installation was much more straightforward than I'd expected.

'uname -r' now reveals "2.6.35-22ck-generic" and, while this is just my subjective assessment, a few of the quirks I had noticed before on my own system where things would get sluggish when switching between apps / opening closing apps while running things that read/write to the disk, seem to have been ironed out.

I would love to test this in a more empirical manner, as I can now boot into either kernel to do comparisons, but I don't know of any software that would allow me to benchmark performance in a way that is sensitive to the optimizations the BFS allegedly implements.

Such drastic change! I have seen this happen on numerous systems and I just change the elevator to "deadline" and poof! The problem is gone. See this discussion for some details. The CFQ scheduler is great for a Linux server running a database, but it completely sucks for desktop or any server used to write large files to.

But Apple can't be blamed for that. You want your programs to use their repository features you submit it to their repository. Just like if you want you programs to be included in a Linux repository you submit it to the repository maintainer.

Well yes, but with linux the whole infrastructure is open. If you want the benefits of repository based easy install and automatic updating for Ubuntu then you submit it to canonical. If they reject you for inclusion you can always try and get included in the Universe repositories. If that fails you can always get it added to one of the third party repositories (such as, say Medibuntu which many users add to their repositories). If that fails you can do like Google did for their Chrome linux beta and simply host their own repository. If that fails you can always set up you own PPA on launchpad.

The only thing Ubuntu's core repositories have going for them is that they are in the repository list by default. Any of those other options, from third party, to a PPA, will, once added to the repository list (which is easy to do), see your app as indistinguishable from the Ubuntu provided ones when the user browses available applications, updates, etc. There is no "one true repository" -- you can add more if you wish and the app selection and updating tools will see it as all the same. Other distros are no different.

This is a significant difference, unless Apple actually allows independent people to set up their own stores that will, if selected by the user, see the apps from that store presented right along side the Apple store apps in the same GUI. If that's the case, then great; if it's not, then there is a big difference bwteen Linux repositories and what Apple is proposing.

I would poke around some of the N900 focused forums, they may already be capable of what you're looking for and if not someone may have figured out how to add it already.

talk.maemo.org would be a good starting point.

And a few pointers:
Concerns about the calendar; closed-source UI [WONTFIX], backend component open though.
HOWTO: Syncevolution with N900 and wiki.
status of Ubuntu One Client
Meego on N900 may offer better possibilities, but it's not there yet.

Usually that is the case but

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sun-java6/+bug/659937

The current version appears to be vulnerable. you can manually update or use the ppa

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:duh/sun-java6

and then the usual update upgrade
when the official packaging comes out it should overwrite the ppa version.

let me resize a window on any edge, not just a tiny 10x10 pixel corner... oh and double click to maximise... how I could dream!

or you could run Linux with Compiz and Emerald. I use a glass theme of my own devising, with Cillop-Go widgets, and avant-window-navigator for that glitz and glamor.

Of course, if that's not where your software runs, then it's not the environment in which you're going to work, but it certainly is a nice place to hang out.

I am having a problem with Debian and report a bug there, although it remains unfixed. But Ubuntu comes in and fixes the bug which was put on the bug tracker of another system.

Oh don't worry, it happens the other way too. Take this very simple and annoying issue, which Ubuntu hasn't bothered to fix since 2008. Debian fixed it in April.

Here's your bug I think: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/268502

This is maybe an upstream bug, https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12045

so it's not Ubuntu's fault. Debian has probably the same issue (hint: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=525220)

If you want to get it fixed, go on LKML and bluetooth userspace developer list, reproduce the issue and find the maintainer(s).

My experience is different.

I had a kernel issue with Lucid. I tracked it down upstream, followed the bug fixing on lkml *(testing patches), got it fixed on latest development branch and in -stable, backported it to Maverick s kernel and now am running Maverick happy.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/86820

What have you done to get the bug fixed ?

Lately, what I have been primarily running has been Ubuntu's Maverick Meerkat's alpha and then beta. Not to suggest the alpha was always rock-solid - sometimes huge bugs crept up in it that had me switching back to my stable Ubuntu Lucid Lynx distribution. But if they were bad they were usually dealt with swiftly.

Here is why I think Ubuntu, Canonical and Maverick Meerkat have done a great job.

In February of this year, I was installing Debian squeeze on another system. Once installed, I looked in /etc/fstab to see information on my disk partitions. The disk information was in UUID format, and a comment line in fstab said "Use 'vol_id --uuid' to print the universally unique identifier for a device". So, I did what the file told me and did a "vol_id --uuid". But it didn't work. There was no vol_id program. I did a little digging and saw that the vol_id program had been a part of the udev package on lenny, but now it no longer was. The program to decode those mysterious UUID's had disappeared. I did a little more digging and discovered the blkid program in the util-linux package could decode those UUIDs. I tried it out, it translated the UUIDs to device names for me, and I was happy. However, I realized /etc/fstab was still giving everyone faulty information. So in February I filed a bug report with Debian.

So now it is October, and my bug report sits in Debian's bug tracker, undisturbed by anyone. There have been four updates to the partman-target package (which creates the initial /etc/fstab) since my bug, but none implementing my suggestion to remove the outdated suggestion of using the no longer existent vol_id program, and replacing it with a suggestion to use blkid. In August, Debian squeeze froze in anticipation of release, so it becomes more unlikely my bug will be fixed.

So where does Ubuntu stand with all of this? Well back in May, Ubuntu resynchronized their partman-target with Debian. While doing so, someone checked out Debian's bug tracker, saw my report, and fixed the problem in Ubuntu. While their change log in May notes this, I can see it myself when looking at /etc/fstab on my meerkat - "Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier for a device".

So this - I find impressive. I am having a problem with Debian and report a bug there, although it remains unfixed. But Ubuntu comes in and fixes the bug which was put on the bug tracker of another system.

Yes, this is just talking about the quality of the distribution and not all of the other things involved, which of course, are important. I know how some Debian developers were (and some still are) unhappy with Canonical and Ubuntu, and how some other upstream contributors are unhappy with Canonical (like Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman) and so forth. And whatever acrimony exists, I think the Debian folks and Linux folks and the like are right that Canonical and Ubuntu have to find a way to push more patches upstream. Here is a case though where the bug fix was already upstream, but only Ubuntu decided to implement it.

Considering that I got Ubuntu for free (as in beer), I have been very happy with the responsiveness of the (Canonical etc.) Ubuntu team to my problems and patches via their bug-tracking system, Launchpad. As far as I'm concerned, it is one of the best, and probably largest, testbeds of the Gnome desktop environment out there. I think it's really going to allow for a good, integrated Gnome desktop environment experience, and hopefully the Canonical/Gnome relationship goes w

The preferences dialog didn't come until 0.6.1, the GP posts are probably using the older version.

  The newer binaries for Lucid (and Maverick) are here.

SB

https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/625793

If you use a second keyboard layout and switching, don't upgrade, this still isn't fixed and it's hell, at random points in time it starts rapidly changing the layout, leading to weird results in what you type.

Also there are two problems with the NVidia driver - one is that the text is horribly slow with the included driver, you need to install the beta from the site, and the other is that the nouveau driver fucks up the card and makes it impossible to use the card, so I had to revert to an older kernel. There's a bug for this too somewhere, can't remember the ID.

The problem is that when you install an application, Android gives you a big long list of things that the app wants to do.

This is not a problem. This is a good thing. Google should perhaps group some of the more common lists and call them by friendlier names.

I have proposed a similar thing for ubuntu and other linux distros: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/156693

In the future, the OS should prompt the user that an application wants to do something (eg. accessing your address book) at the point it wants to do it

This would be annoying, and normal users are likely to still not make the right decisions.

For people who can't be bothered to read and understand the big long list of things that an app wants to do, what Google or whoever should do is to allow 3rd parties to audit and certify a given app for a given big long list of things it wants to do. To make it easy, Google could add a site/service/app that allows such 3rd parties to audit and certify/vouch for apps.

That way, you can say "I trust X to check the apps for me". You should also be able to optionally whitelist everything signed by X, so if an app and its list is certified by X, you don't get any prompts.

Say your parents, relatives and friends might trust you about these "IT" stuff, and so you go to the android app site, and check a particular app for them (going through the long list to see if its reasonable), or a bunch of apps.

Or employees of Company B might get corporate phones which can only run apps certified by Company B (whose cert is installed in the phones/computers).
Or people might choose to trust apps certified by some IT security firm.

The benefit to Google? Google gets to know who are the informal "IT advisors" for various groups of people. This can be useful for advertisers.

Google might even allow entities to charge subscription for access to the certification advice, and take a cut from it.

This security model is definitely better than the current security model which antivirus software and normal people have to cope with:

The current model is: "given a computer program, without it's source code or full inputs, figure out whether it would screw you or not".

Computer scientists should notice that at least with the "Halting Problem" you are given the source code and the full inputs, and even then it is still considered unsolvable for the general case.

Can you copy CDs again yet? Brasero has been broken in LTS (and apparently Meerkat) since it launched.

I've been a long long time user of Ubuntu but I get more and more angry at these new releases where things are left broken simply to meet release deadlines. Even with these issues I still use it however but more because I'm lazy to switch to something new and have to learn a new bunch of problems.

Here's some things you probably don't realise about Ubuntu:

- Filing bugs in launchpad is a complete waste of time as they never get fixed or a response unless it is UI related. What ubuntu simply does is wait until upstream have fixed an issue then upgrade to that version. It's the reason they want to push their bugs upstream and have developed launchpad to do just that; to absolve themselves from all responsibility.

- Ubuntu takes most of their packages from Debian. They don't spend much effort on actually packaging software. You said they do a damn fine job. NO THEY DON'T. Debian does. In fact most of the issues I've experienced are when Ubuntu decides to change a package but those are rare.

So basically the situation we have is Ubuntu is maintained by a small team of paid staff and hundreds of volunteers, all bugs get forwarded upstream, all packages taken from Debian apart from when they decided to change a package in which case they have their patches.

So out of this what exactly it is that Canonical gives back? Well there are translations, bug reports, the launchpad tracker (the site software, not the website; which doesn't work standalone, the whole thing is setup to only develop for their site), UI improvements (which they've been criticised for not merging upstream), bazaar and probably some other things.

I personally don't care if Canonical contributes anything back upstream however credit where it's due they don't seem to be doing much compared to other companies in the linux distro arena. The problem however is when they say they do; or people like you credit them for things they don't do such as providing good packaged software.

This is the same problem I had - my RAlink card automagically worked on the 10.04 release, but broke on the 10.10 development version. I didn't have time to look into it so I put aside using 10.10 for a few months. A few weeks ago I had some time, so I looked into it and saw that the rt2860sta and rt2800pci modules conflicted, so I blacklisted rt2800pci. This was the biggest problem I encountered, and it is still there.

That is useful tip, thank you. I'll give it a try.

Some comments here say that there are still issues with WPA, once you get that going on a basic level. We'll see.

The real headache there is that I've also got wired Ethernet card broken in Linux (Realtek 8186c, which gives me this), so I end up with no networking whatsoever. And manually downloading the required packages on the laptop and copying them over on a USB stick gets really annoying.

The fix for that one is known, at least - manually compile and install a third-party driver. Not a problem as such, but it'll break on every kernel update if I don't remember to recompile, and the reason I want Ubuntu there in the first place is to not have to muck around with such things.