Ubunu 8.10: Another buggy release

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Sunday, November 16. 2008

Ubunu 8.10: Another buggy release

I really want to be liking Ubuntu, but the 8.10 release is once again a disaster. There's a nasty freeze bug on my ThinkPads (T61p and X300) when I use WiFi. The machines just randomly lock up. It took about 3 months before 8.04 was stable. I figured it was because the Ubuntu folks pushed a lot of stuff into the Long Term Support release. In terms of the crap that is 8.10, there's just no excuse. If 9.04 is as bad as 8.04 and 8.10, I'm going to find another distribution. Gack.

Posted by David Pollak in Business at 20:46 | Comments (10) | Trackbacks (0)

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Go arch, man (archlinux.org), it's an excellent step-up. I see no reason though to rant publicly about something you got for free and which had been forged from an extreme amount of work and love.

#1 Kristof Jozsa on 2008-11-16 23:20 (Reply)

Open source software is not free. While I did not pay $ to Canonical for Ubuntu, I spent my time installing the software. I could run Windows (which is costless to me because it was bundled with the machine and there's no alternative but to use it), but choose not to and am very public about ranting about the poor quality of Windows. Further, Canonical and RedHat are both for-profit entities which have a business model around promoting their Linux distributions.

When I've gone into production, I've purchased RHEL and RedHat support. My day-to-day use of a distribution is a test-bed for a commercial relationship.

Finally, I run an open source project (Lift Web Framework) and you can be sure that I care a lot about where we've failed in Lift. I want to hear the good and the bad. I suspect that anyone who is building complex software wants to here what others are saying.
I Canonical doesn't care what their customers have to say, that'd be a good reason not to use them. I do believe, however, that Canonical does care what folks think about Ubuntu.

#1.1 David Pollak (Homepage) on 2008-11-17 05:48 (Reply)

My experience of most Linux distros has been that they suck on recent-model laptops. On the positive side, last week I installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my 2-year old Acer TM8100 and it has been really smooth sailing - I was amazed that WiFi just worked out of the box with no NDISwrapper crap. Only problem so far has been the inbuilt SD reader not working (no big deal), and realizing that the official Sun JRE is better than OpenJDK for running NetBeans (duh). You need to get yourself an older laptop, David.

#2 Darren Hague (Homepage) on 2008-11-17 01:02 (Reply)

I use a 8510w from HP with no problems at all.. this model is not even a year old

#3 Kristof Jozsa on 2008-11-17 05:41 (Reply)

i've had the same experience with recent ubuntu distributions. once they're stable they're wonderful to work with and it's the best desktop distribution i've come across. but i've learned from experience to never jump into the fray when a new release comes out... things never seem to be stable enough out of the gates.

i use a thinkpad myself because until recently lenovo had an purchase option which includes SUSE Linux and their laptops have been known to be fairly linux compatible in the past.

i'd be interested to know which distribution you end up choosing, please post about it. i agree with your comment above about the time spent on linux. the old adage rings true: linux is free if you don't value your time.

#4 hernan silberman on 2008-11-17 08:51 (Reply)

I just switched to Ubuntu from Fedora on my two-year-old laptop because Ubuntu is supported for Android development and Fedora isn't.

Everything--OpenGL, WiFi, power management, the SD card slot--has always Just Worked on this laptop since Fedora 8. (Fedora 9 is current and Fedora 10 arrives next week.)

With the most recent Ubuntu, when I'm running on battery, the screen gets brighter, then dimmer, then brighter, then dimmer forever in a sine-wave-like oscillating pattern. And power management fails randomly. Grrr.

Fedora 10 arrives next week. Maybe I'll switch back and port the Android tools to Fedora...

I really prefer the huge default package repository Ubuntu has and the Debian-based update tools. But not at the cost of my laptop not working.

#5 Dave Orme on 2008-11-18 14:24 (Reply)

Funny, I was thrilled to see that 8.10 supported wireless on my Macbook without any further fuss. I've been a longtime Suse user though and am waiting for 11.1's release in December. I'm stuck on KDE and Suse's KDE support has been pretty good in the past.

#6 MBH on 2008-11-19 08:14 (Reply)

I for one think Ubuntu 8.10 is very, very stable. It runs well on all of my machines, including a Dell Latitude D630. And it's not Canonical's fault that your Thinkpad uses hardware that doesn't provide good drivers for Linux. That's more a fault of history, and demand. You should blame the hardware manufacturers, not the Ubuntu community.

#7 JB on 2008-11-23 06:37 (Reply)

Ubuntu 8.04 works fine on my hardware. I think it's very reasonable for my to call Canonical on the carpet for regressions. In fact, on the X300, there are no restricted drivers in use. All the drivers are open and free. Canonical chose the drivers and the kernel version (given that the underlying hardware is pretty dissimilar between my two ThinkPads, I doubt that it's a single driver) and they chose drivers and a kernel version that is radically unstable. I have gone as far as migrating the X300 to Vista to allow it to be usable.

#7.1 David Pollak (Homepage) on 2008-11-23 13:08 (Reply)

Any one know why Ubuntu doesn't work too well on my Axioo Laptop. I know Axioo is the cheapest of computers, but Mandriva works well. I want touse Ubuntu, but it seems to have a problem with the VGA. If anyone has a solution, I'd be mighty obliged.

#8 Mike on 2009-05-25 23:13 (Reply)

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