A Man and his Penguin

Oh, an Ubuntu developer somewhere in the world feels like a complete fool.

Users who like to live on the edge (the Bleeding Edge) and set their computers to auto-update awoke to find that Ubuntu’s GUI would no longer start up.

Other people manually updated their xserver-xorg-core package, rebooted, and found out the hard way.

Somebody dropped the ball on that package update. Most users had trouble with it. It’s now safe to update the package, but if you’re running package version ubuntu10.2 there are no benefits. I know a number of people thought they’d done something wrong, and fiddled with xorg.conf for hours before reinstalling Ubuntu… then their newly-installed system updated itself and broke again!

It’s good that the developers are trying to fix bugs in Dapper rather than just fixing them for Edgy, but there really should be better quality control. And there should be a way of notifying all users if something bad has happened, rather than expect them to download a text-based web browser and go to www.ubuntu-forums.org.

As I have limited broadband, I only download major security updates and bug-fixes that personally affect me. For instance, CUPS (the printing system) didn’t really work at first, but two sets of updates later it works fine for me. Other things, like Openoffice.org, already work fine so I haven’t bothered to update them.

Let’s hope problems like these don’t happen again, to users of ANY distro.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2006 at 2:48 am and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.