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Our Blogs Open Sauce Fixing bugs: how distributions react | Fixing bugs: how distributions react |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 11 April 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 The Debian project has come up with a workaround; the project media spokesman Martin "Joey" Schulze detailed it thus: "The Debian maintainer of the respective package, acpi-support, Bart Samwel, has been watching the Ubuntu bug report with interest. Since the problem has been reported in Launchpad that would be the logical place to discuss this bug report and its solution. The plan was to reach consensus and then implement whatever solution is proper. "However, since no consensus has been reached until today (April 4) he took matters into his own hands. The problem is supposed to be fixed in version 0.103-2 of acpi-support which he uploaded on November 28, 2007. That version is already part of lenny, the next stable Debian release. "The bugfix is discussed in the bug log and is the same you're applying manually to your drive, i.e. hdparm -B 254. However, in our version of acpi-support this command is only applied when the notebook is running on AC power. "If the machine is running on battery instead, it applies hdparm -B 128 (the default). The reasoning behind this is that data protection (the head parking actually prevents head crashes in a mobile situation) is more important while on battery." I asked former Debian developer and sometime Ubuntu developer Matthew Garrett for some input on this bug, primarily because power management is a field in which he consults. He has not responded but in the past his response has been somewhat off-handed, portraying the problem as the responsibility of the vendor. But then there have been cases in the past - the famous Pentium f00f bug in early versions of the processor for which Ingo Molnar developed a workaround for the Linux kernel comes to mind - where hardware bugs were worked around through software fixes. Hence asking people to scrap with hardware vendors is not the most helpful way out of this impasse. Of the other four bugs which I asked the Ubuntu project public relations people about, fixes have been released for the bug which results in keys getting stuck while using Compiz and the one relating to timezones going awry. The other two have not been fixed as of this writing (April 11, 2am AEST) as far as the Launchpad entries go - and that's what I have been asked to go by.
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