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Our Blogs Open Sauce Hardy Heron? Hardly | Hardy Heron? Hardly |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 25 April 2008 | |
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Page 1 of 3 Last month, a piece which I authored about what I perceived to be the significance of the release commanded extraordinary interest. And thereafter I noticed a spate of something in the nature of copycat pieces springing up all over the web - with no attribution at all. A little bit of plagiarism, I guess, is the best form of adulation. Welcome to the wonderful world of the interweb! But this piece isn't about the copy and paste artists - this is concerned with said release; on April 19, the release candidate for 8.04 was out on the web and it has been running on my spare PC since that day. By the time this appears on the web, Hardy Heron would have been released. Frankly, I expected more from a release that has long term support. There are bugs aplenty, some of them extremely annoying and serious ones. This is a problem in an LTS release; it would have passed muster for an ordinary one. The bug that causes a high frequency of load and unload cycles on the hard drives of some laptops is still hanging fire. Perhaps Ubuntu should provide a warning when one tries to carry out a laptop installation - something in the nature of "warning - don't install unless you are ready to sacrifice your hard drive in a year." When I inquired about this bug sometime back, I was told, in a terse one-liner, to look at Launchpad. What I can glean from that venerable repository now is the fact that the bug has been assigned to the Ubuntu kernel ACPI team. Wonderful, considering that the bug isn't something new - it was first reported on September 9, 2006. By contrast, Debian, the one distribution that everyone criticises for long release cycles (Ubuntu takes great pride in keeping the six-monthly release cycle schedule, right down to the day), has issued a fix which will work for some laptops. The old man has outdone the youngster by a few miles. There is an out here - one could argue that it is impossible to find one fix for all laptops, given the various power management schemes which are in play. True. But that is no excuse for doing nothing. At least provide a warning when one tries to carry out a laptop install. Open source should extend to openness about bugs as well - else we might as well follow the practices of a certain company in Redmond. (if such practices were adopted, I'm sure the Linux Foundation would be able to provide a thesaurus from which the language for explaining these things in an obfuscatory manner could be obtained. |
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