Bugs, bugs and more bugs
Filed under: Development, Linux, Projects, Ubuntu
Lately, I’ve come to realize more and more that bug handling in open source, and specifically in Ubuntu has dramatically declined in efficiency. For years I’ve been extremely satisfied with using Linux because it’s bug free, there has simply not been any serious bugs that I’ve run into. In the last weeks, I’ve run into several more or less serious bugs in Ubuntu, which got me looking at how the bug handling is done.
First off, a few weeks ago, I ran into a bug with Ubuntu 10.10 Ubiquity (the Live CD installer) where I accidentally marked my old /home drive as ext4 when it was ext3 (but not to reformat it). The installer complied happily, and set it up as ext4, but once it got back online, the harddrive was completely wiped. No warning, no nothing. I started looking around, after a while I’ve found several reports on the same matter on launchpad. For example this and this.
This lead me to take a look at Ubiquity’s other bugs in launchpad, and it’s not very promising. The main installer of Ubuntu 10.10 has 1528 Open bugs as of writing this, of which 846 bugs are new, 35 bugs are marked High importance — and the bugs I found (dare I say, they seem Critical to me, are still not marked with any importance at all). Only 12 bugs are marked as having a patch.
Fine, maybe this is not the poster child of open source. However, the last few days I’ve been severely annoyed by the password popup which is misbehaving. I enter the password, and hit enter (or hit the Authenticate button) and the password field disappears, but the rest of the dialog stays up, and nothing works in it. The only thing you can do is to kill it with the x button. When you do this, you get authenticated…
Since I’m not sure exactly how the authentication is performed in Ubuntu for the update manager etc, I decided to check the update-manager package for Ubuntu on Launchpad. What do I see, if not another package with gigantic mass of bugs filed, but noone dealing with them. 1017 Open bugs, 520 of those are New and 15 marked as High importance. This bug I’ve been having has been reported all over the net, but noone seems to be dealing with it and it isn’t really reported in launchpad. Some computers has it, some doesn’t. It’s nowhere near a critical bug, or even a high importance one, but it’s annoying none the less and it looks extremely crude and comes off giving a fairly unstable feeling.
All this being said, I am wondering how bug handling is done, and how it should be managed on “aggregate” projects such as Debian and Ubuntu. I think the idea is really nice, having upstream bug trackers for each package in the project, but maybe we are spreading too thin having several bug trackers for each minor project? Also, how do we as “normal” users know which package is the reason for the error? I am not so sure it is really the update-manager that is the error in this case, it might as well be some completely other thing behind all that dbus stuff etc. Ie, what is the point of me filing bug reports if I’m not sure they wind up in the right place, or are at all looked after?
Ubuntu 10.10 r8192se_pci driver on the Toshiba Satellite T130-17E (Realtek RTL8191SEvB)
Filed under: Development, Linux, Phone, Ubuntu, Windows
I’ve been home for a few days with a really bad back, and the only thing I’ve been able to do is watch tv, and some minor work with the laptop. I’ve been running Windows 7 which it was delivered with for a few months to get a feel of it, and I must say I was pleasantly surprised for the most part. It hasn’t crashed more than once or twice in three months, and it is fairly snappy (except boottimes seems to get worse and worse, at this point it takes 2-3 minutes to boot). Anyways, for some reason I get a bit sad inside (and bored) every time I boot Windows, there is just “something” about the feel, the look or… I can’t really put my finger on it, that I can’t stand. How the windows open and close perhaps, I just don’t know.
So, yesterday I wanted to test android SDK, re-realized just how much of a bitch it is to install stuff on Windows, so I finally got around to installing Ubuntu 10.10 on it (Already running 10.10 on desktop and mediapc), removing the extra backup partition they deliver laptops with these days. Sidenote, isn’t it a bit like selling a candle with a flammable fire extinguisher to sell a laptop with 500gig harddrive, split it in half, and use on half for “backups”? I digress.
So, installation went almost flawless. The wireless card was identified, saw networks, but was unable to connect to any of them. I managed to pass the installation using trusty old cables, and after installation was done I started fiddling about, reading on the net etc, and found noone who had solved the combination or at least written about it.
Main problem seems to have been hardware wep encoding/decoding, which can be turned off using the hwwep flag to the r8192se_pci module. On Ubuntu 10.10, remove the module, and then reload it by doing this:
rmmod r8192se_pci
modprobe r8192se_pci hwwep=0
If your network works now, you can automate the setting by editing/adding the configuration to modprobe.d, by editing /etc/modprobe.d/realtek.conf and adding the following line:
options r8192se_pci hwwep=0
I hope this has been some help!
Using Ubuntu as Media Server for Xbox360
I got a Xbox360 since about a year and I just noticed it had some way of connecting to a PC, using the PC as a Media Server. Unfortunately it required a Windows Media Center installation to work, or so it claimed at least. This is probably not news to anyone, but it was very easy to get Ubuntu (or any other Linux distro as a matter of fact) to serve media for the Xbox 360. Xbox 360 uses UPnP to get media from the Windows Media Center PC. To make any recent Ubuntu able to serve UPnP suitable for the Xbox, do the following:
- sudo apt-get install ushare
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure ushare
- sudo vim /etc/ushare.conf
- Make sure all the settings are correct.
- sudo vim /etc/default/ushare
- Make sure it contains USHARE_OPTIONS=”–xbox”.
- sudo /etc/init.d/ushare restart
You should now be able to find the PC by searching for it from the Xbox interface (the name you set in ushare.conf should show up in the list of found PC’s). Now that that’s said, I should hint that the Xbox360 has a really shitty availability of audio and video codecs, and I don’t know if it’s possible to resolve this problem. There are hints that there is something called a UPnP Media Adaptor on the ushare website which should be able to convert to proper file formats as necessary, but ushare does not have that ability. Of course, that would give a shitload of cpu load on the fileserver as well, something which sounds less good in my opinion.
My personal opinion so far, Xbox 360 media center is really simple to use, but the available codecs, flexibility and scalability is catastrophically bad in comparison to my MythBuntu installation (still running 9.04 though). The Mythbuntu installation is a bit heavy on the configuration, but much more flexible, handles almost all codecs I’ve run into without even a hitch, and very scalable.