LWN: Comments on "Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released"

Logout vs. shutdown

dfsmith — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 01:14:42 +0000

How does it protect you that shutting it down from desktop has been made harder?

Because now the Shutdown will be more than 2 pixels away from Logout. (This machine must not be shutdown EXCEPT when maintenance needs to do something like remove AC power—and they can do than from GDM and power it back up again afterwards without having a login account.)

Logout vs. shutdown

alankila — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:16:12 +0000

If you are drowsy, wouldn't you just quit the desktop and then shut the machine down from the GDM dialog anyway? How does it protect you that shutting it down from desktop has been made harder?

Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released

alankila — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:09:52 +0000

Another random issue.

As I'm a win32 gamer, I have a logitech dual action joypad. This used to be happily ignored by X server, but no longer. The left stick appears to produce events that position the mouse in screen. It can't be used for UI because the mouse position is absolute, not relative, so it reflects the degree that I have pushed the left analog stick. That makes fine control impossible and the stick thus useless.

The real problem? It's a noisy stick. Every few minutes it reads an event that makes X think I had moved the stick, with the end result that I now have a mouse pointer that occasionally jumps in the middle of the screen, interrupting what I'm doing in another window due to focus-follows-mouse.

When investigating the issue closer, I happened to press a button on the controller. Boom! Instant X segfault, with message: "Unable to handle keycode 296". At least it said something before dying...

I guess this is what betas are for: for beating some sense into the programs.

Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released

alankila — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 13:02:49 +0000

You are right. That's useful. Thanks.

Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released

osma — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:42:53 +0000

Now you need to exit to the GDM session screen before you can shutdown machine.

I still have Shutdown as an option in the System menu after upgrading from Hardy to Intrepid beta.

Logout vs. shutdown

dfsmith — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:27:20 +0000

Now you need to exit to the GDM session screen before you can shutdown machine. This doesn't look like progress to me...

This is excellent progress! When you're drowsy and you hit Shutdown instead of Logout on the server then walk out of the door late at night, you will find this out too. (Next morning, when there's a lot of voicemail.) Admittedly the "feature" is less useful for desktop machines, but they get suspended rather than shut down anyway.

Ubuntu 8.10 Beta released

alankila — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 12:27:41 +0000

FIrst impressions: installable, runs, hasn't crashed yet. In nearly every respect it looks and feels like Hardy to me, except that GNOME log out dialog has begun to suck. Now you need to exit to the GDM session screen before you can shutdown machine. This doesn't look like progress to me...

Thinks seem worse on closed source front, too. Nvidia-glx-* packages seem to not work any more, you compile your own kernel driver by installing some source package like nvidia-177-kernel-source. fglrx is still broken, I think, so no 3D features for ATI. As an upside, Flash10 works better than Flash9 ever did. No crashes or problems during repeatedly reloading youtube videos. Finally.

I also suffered a failure on rtl8169 gigaethernet card, it stopped transmitting after 15 minutes of use, when it previously ran for > 300 days using 2.6.22. However, the switch it is connected to is not the same as that also changed during my upgrades, so not sure yet if this is a genuine Linux regression or just hardware badness. :-/

Surprise inherited from earlier system: on my Thinkpad laptop, Linux suddenly crashed being unable to write to the end part of harddisk. Error was "attempt to access beyond end of device". After half-an-hour debugging session I figured out that manufacturer had protected the last 3 GB of the disk and kept a Win32 install image there. Possibly the original Hardy installation was faulty and never noticed HPA, and thus simplistically allocated the whole drive when in fact the last part was always unwritable. Or, maybe 2.6.27 honors HPA better. Not sure at this point. In any case, installers should always shrink the disk to accommodate HPA, might be worth a bug raport even.