I’ve become quite reluctant to blog about problems I have with Ubuntu. This is because I normally get bombarded with calls to file a bug. I tend to tinker with my machine a lot, as well as use ‘unofficial’ packages, this means that I would prefer to investigate a bit to make sure as far as I can that it is not something I have done that has broken it.
At the moment I am running Feisty on both my laptop, and on my desktop. Last week, on the laptop, I could not boot into gnome. It would just go grey screem, with the top left quarter of my screen a slightly lighter grey. After a bit of prodding and poking in the console I have come to the conclusion that it was the subversion Beryl that was breaking things. So that’s gone for now. Interestingly, it does the same thing if I try to use the desktop-effects package from the repository. On the desktop, network-manager-gnome has stopped ‘detecting’ the wireless card.This is a PITA because it was working fine, so I took out the network cable that it was using before.
I find both of these problems supremely frustrating for 2 reasons. The first is that both of these things WERE working. And now they are not. The second is that by the time I’ve finsihed prodding and poking and got my words right in order to file a useful bug, it will probably have been fixed (I am using Feisty, remember, so the rate of change in packages isvery fast at the moment).
Please don’t leave a comment telling me to file a bug, as I will. As soon as I know what the problem is.
{ 4 } Comments
you should file a bug
Seriously – the comments fields are now white text white background???
Ok, I wont say file a bug, but I will say – this *is* feisty, a *development* release. Stuff breaks, that’s what happens in the development version of Ubuntu (and Debian) and has done for years. If you dont like it, dont run the development release.
Gary: Just trying to keep you on your toes?
Should be fixed now?
Alan: I know it is. That’s the point I was trying to get across at the end. It obviously didn’t come across properly. It just annoys me slightly when things stop working when they were top notch. I will probably approach you on IRC later for some more opinions on what I would should ‘do’ when things go wrong
I feel your pain. In Dapper I had an almost-working laptop; the only thing that wasn’t supported was the SD/XD/MMC/MS Card reader. After upgrading to Edgy, the card reader works, but the IEEE1394, Wi-Fi, Suspend/Hibernate/Resume and Battery/AC status are all broken, and I get constant “APIC error on CPU0: 40(40)” messages in dmesg. This, for me, is a regression. I have raised bugs in Launchpad, but they have attracted little attention. I did start trying to work back through the kernel patches to find out when these things broke, but I’ve had to abandon that for the time being due to lack of time.
It’s annoying when things break like this, especially in release versions, but I take comfort in the fact that I can at least do something about it — if I were on Windows and I raised this problem and no-one else looked at it, I’d be stuck. At least I can scratch my own itch and work towards a fix that will benefit others in the community.
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