Technorama

An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on software development primarily.

Saturday, 27 December 2008

Ubuntu fixes for 2009

Here's my list of fixes I'd like to see made in Ubuntu during 2009:

Resize icon fix, a proper sized icon (not single pixel anymore) on all windows, including Thunderbird.
Font fixes, OpenOffice should be able to save documents with fonts like "DejaVu Sans", and have them appear correctly on a Windows machine as Ariel, at present they come out in random like Webdings. OO could even show "Ariel" in its list, even if it is rendered as DejaVu.
Stablity, if compiz or other drivers are flakey, they need to be fixed. Ship the distro with debug symbols and generate proper backtraces for us to submit bugs too.
Respond to bug reports, and don't just close them after not dealing with them because they are now out of date.
Fix the clipboard, still after closing an application window the clipboard contents has disapeared.
Install the clipboard history by default.

Let's hope Ubuntu QA improves too, I'll pay too if there is a plan to sort out the QA testing :)

Labels: Ubuntu

posted by 東京 # 00:25

Comments:

Yes, Ubuntu is not perfect, but none of the issues you have listed effect me. None the less, I am really happy at where Ubuntu is right now. To take things into perspective, you cannot demand the former from an open source project. What you can do is contribute yourself.

# posted by

Paul Weiss : 27 December 2008 at 08:54

@ Paul
Jon doesn't seem to be demanding anything, as he says "fixes I'd like to see made".

@ Jon
Lack of (timely) response to some bug reports comes from overwhelmation (I'm not a native speaker of English, so no one can expect me to know if this is a word or not :-) of those who deal with bugs.

I also would like to see the clipboard always to work as expected (I read somewhere, that this is going to be fixed in the not so distant future).

# posted by

Ari Torhamo : 27 December 2008 at 13:34

I forgot to write "probably", when I gave my explanation for the lack of response to some bug reports (I have no direct knowledge of the reason).

# posted by

Ari Torhamo : 27 December 2008 at 13:40

Firstly, thanks for the comments.

Paul: Really these are just features I'd like to see in Ubuntu working! I'm even happy to pay for them. As you say, it's an open source project, which means people willing to donate funds and time help it along.. :) I've contributed many bug reports to Ubuntu and Mozilla over the years, 99% of them haven't resulted in anything positive due to there QA being "overwhelmed".

Ari: Good news about clipboard! It is getting better. I use the Gclipper in Ubuntu, but when I login often it fails to work in the panel and removes itself.

Let's see where Ubuntu goes in '09! If you know any Ubuntu QA I could donate money to get on top of these issues do let me know, I'm still looking.

# posted by

東京 : 28 December 2008 at 00:52

totem-mozilla is still crashing the whole Ubuntu 7.04 install. Holding the power button down is the only way to get it to reboot.
Xorg.0.log seems to have captured the flaw:

tossed event which came in late
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.

totem kills the system when running standalone too. All latest updates applied, another good example of the missing QA in ubuntu. If only there was a fund to pay into to get some QA staff working on fixes for Ubuntu eh!?

# posted by

東京 : 28 February 2009 at 14:09

A free RAR util is needed, so many RAR are using the new (since 2002! format), so we keep having to use unrar-free to see what is inside the archives, doh.

# posted by

東京 : 5 March 2009 at 20:33

Would be great if it shipped with all the standard .bashrc aliases enabled, its in the file, they just need to uncomment them!

# some more ls aliases
alias ll='ls -l'
alias la='ls -A'
alias l='ls -CF'

# posted by

東京 : 9 March 2009 at 19:22

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