Posts tagged Ubuntu

Update: The story continues, but solution is not in sight yet. I upgraded a buildbot slave to Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) recently and now I'm getting a strange intermittent failure: sometimes cp -r /local/dir /nfs/mounted/dir fails ("process killed by signal 1", i.e. SIGHUP). I wonder if NFS is relevant or incidental to the issue? Google finds an old thread from 2005, with a workaround (usepty=False), but I'd like to understand the problem before applying random fixes.

Ubuntu people want users to use apport to report bugs. There's a command-line tool called 'ubuntu-bug' that you can use if you know the name of the package or at least the name of executable. There's a "Report a problem" menu item in many, but not all GUI apps. Here's what you can do if the GUI app in question doesn't have that menu item, and you don't remember what it's called, and you're the same sort of a crazy command-line person that I am:

Ubuntu 9.04 is going to be released in around three weeks. As usual I couldn't wait (and saw that some bugs that were irritating me every day were fixed in Jaunty), so I upgraded to the current beta. After a little hiccough at the beginning, the upgrade was the smoothest Ubuntu upgrade I've ever had: I spent those two and a half hours browsing the web, watching screencasts and chatting on IRC, while update-manager worked in the background.

Today I happened to read about lazr.enum in a mailing list. I went to the PyPI page and saw raw ReStructuredText markup instead of a nicely formatted page. Now I know from prior experience that this happens when the package's description has an error in the markup. I thought I'd report a bug and provide a patch. Leap of knowledge: since I know lazr.enum was created by the Launchpad.net team I could safely assume they were keeping the sources in Launchpad.

I think I'm going to blog about Ubuntu bugs I encounter during my day. Don't get me wrong—I love Ubuntu and haven't seen a better OS yet. But it has bugs. Why blog and not report them to Launchpad? Many reasons: producing good bug reports is hard work; bugs rarely show up alone, and if I start filing one, I'll forget details about the others; sometimes it's unclear whether something is or is not a bug until you've written it down and looked at it; Launchpad is slow while previewing a blog post on the local machine is fast.