| Recent
Articles |
Centrify Boosts Unix Access To Active Directory
The company announced at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo that its DirectControl Suite now supports a number of UNIX and Linux platforms.
Filepro Conversion
In years past, I did a lot of Filepro work. This goes way, way back: I worked on the first Tandy Xenix version when it was still beta - so beta that it couldn't even do floating point math reliably!
Legacy ISA
I found a professed "competent" student at the local university who spent a couple of hours destroying the setup in one of the machines. We now have one...
Where's the Memory?
I had happened across How To Remotely Monitor Memory Usage and smiled when I saw this...
Inward Bound
There's a Boston customer I have serviced for many...
SMB Caching
A customer had a particular shared folder setup so that only he had access to it. This happened to be a SCO Visionfs system, but you could run into similar problems...
|
|
|
08.29.06
Ubuntu Update Undermines UI
 By
David A. Utter
Users of Ubuntu Linux found themselves locked out of the user interface after their PCs received an update that broke the windowing system for the OS.
A number of Ubuntu users got a look at life before the graphical user interface when the latest update from the Linux distributor shattered the usual windows its users expect to see. Ubuntu blamed a faulty patch for the problem:
When applied to Ubuntu 6.06, the patch inadvertently breaks the desktop windowing environment on some systems. When we learned of the problem, the patch was immediately withdrawn. Mirrors have also been disabled to ensure that the faulty patch isn't available from them.
Ubuntu project founder Mark Shuttleworth also posted about the problematic patch:
As a team we made a series of errors, and the result was a desktop that was broken for thousands of users, for several hours. It has been a severe lesson in QA, something Luis knows plenty about.
An incident report is being compiled by the team and we will publish that for our broader community and users as soon as it is complete. My apologies to those who have been affected...
Shuttleworth also noted a small positive aspect to what and when the problem happened:
If there is a silver lining to the error, it is that it happened during the one week in six months when we have the core distribution development team together in one place. This gave us the opportunity not just to analyse and fix the issue, and to talk about the sequence of events that led to the problem, but also to discuss the processes we must improve to further reduce the likelihood of a repeat.
Ubuntu has received a lot of positive press for its otherwise high-quality Linux distribution. It has also spawned a couple of other distros, the KDE-based Kubuntu, the educational-focused Edubuntu, and the slimmer Xfce Desktop-based Xubuntu.
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
|
