Yesterday I installed the beta version of lucid lynx, whose final release is due on April 29th. As I was repeatedly shaking my head over the mess, they left and created here and there, I now have to write about it. In order of appearance, here are the worst fuck-ups:
Of course, it's a beta version of Lucid I'm ranting about, but some of those "bugs" look like they might be regarded as "features" by the Ubuntu developers. If I trip over more of those, I'll keep this list updated.
- They broke "nc": Seriously. What application is there more basic and grown up than netcat. And they broke it, by setting some default value for the -q option. Of course it's just Ubuntu and everything works fine upstream, even in Debian. Here's the corresponding bug report: #544935
- The XFCE team broke gnome-keyring-daemon: I'm not yet sure where the problem actually comes from, but my fix from this article apparently stopped to work. I've filed a bug about it, let's hope someone will pick it up. Here's the corresponding bug report: #564831
- They totally messed up system-config-printer: In Karmic you could just install the right package via aptitude, discover the printer and select the driver to make it all work. In Lucid, you are confronted with jockey, the automatic driver installer you might already know from getting your display adapter to work with restricted drivers. This time, it is your friend not so much. Instead, it installs 34(!!) packages including libqt4-* (FAIL), alien (FAIL) and rpm (MO... MO... MONSTERFAIL), just to install some rpm-version of the I-work-with-a-single-deb driver. What a crap! Here's the report: #564633.
- XFCE Terminal text selection is broken: "How can that be broken?" Exactly that's the question. I can't imagine what the code has to look like, to break such a trivial thing. If you select some text, that doesn't fit into your terminal, you
cancould simply scroll up, start the selection, scroll down and then shift-click to the end of your selection, to mark (and select) the whole range in between. In Lucid, you can mark the whole range, but your extension is not copied to the clipboard. Instead, only the first selection ends up there. Here's the report: #565330 - No more text startup: As some might consider it a feature to have full resolution during startup, others prefer to see the boot process in all its textual glory. However, despite all reconfigurability, the only way to make Plymouth change back to an textual display, is to manually delete /lib/plymouth/themes/default.plymouth and run update-initramfs afterwards. Well done. (I think they'll fix this apparent bug in the final release.)
Of course, it's a beta version of Lucid I'm ranting about, but some of those "bugs" look like they might be regarded as "features" by the Ubuntu developers. If I trip over more of those, I'll keep this list updated.