Having abandoned Karmic, I've been installing Lucid Alpha 3 on a number of different systems, mostly for testing, and am finding lots of bugs. For example, on an old Acer Aspire 3000 laptop, after a completely generic Alpha 3 install + or - up to March 8 daily updates:
1. The console driver is broken: vt1-vt6 only display 13.5 characters (yes, I meant 13 and one half characters). 2. X works fine, but will sometimes come up on vt7, other times on vt8 -- I haven't been able to determine a pattern. 3. There is a timing problem with logging in on the gdm console: the first attempt to login always fails, the second always succeeds -- unless I wait 4-5 minutes before attempting to log in, in which case the first login attempt succeeds (usually). For mission critical issues I will take the time to carefully file a bug report on launchpad, but for stuff like this I just don't have time. For example, I have no idea what package to associate the console graphics problem with and don't really have time to find out. What I want to be able to do is have some place to state the build I'm installing, describe the hardware I'm installing it on (e.g. this system has an SIS M760GX graphics chip and an AMD Sempron processor), and then list the problems I'm having and done, back to work. The someone more knowledgeable than me can parse and triage the issues to the right package maintainers. ubuntu-bug doesn't work this way AFAIK (no idea how I'd use it with the problems described above), and apport isn't doing it for me. After one login (I've been turning the machine on and off a lot trying to narrow down the specific list of problems), a dialog box popped up announcing that some serious kernel panic had occurred, that the system was now unstable, and would I like to report a bug to "help the developers"? Sure, why not. Apport then proceeded to ask me a series of questions not even Linus could answer: e.g., "is this bug similar to any of these bugs?" How would I know? The only information I have is a dialog box telling me the kernel panicked -- I don't have any information. I've been using linux for 15 years; now imagine throwing these dialogs at some neophyte. This is bound to do more harm than good, since the experience is surreal, to say the least. Assuming no one is available to parse these multi-bug reports, I could probably write a perl script in a couple of days that would search through them looking for keywords and then alert specific package maintainers based on topics they've registered to trigger an alert. SJ Remnant could write an event driven version in an hour. It seems to me that for pre-release code, where users/testers are likely to find multiple problems, it should be made as easy as possible to report these problems. Also, please don't suggest the ubuntu+1 IRC, this is beyond completely useless. -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
