I would like to respond to Dan's comments about Linux/Ubuntu quality. To not dilute the discussion on my specific bug Ive moved it over here. Like all of you, I share the enthusiasm for Linux and open source software. To me, the greatest features are the ability to see the inner mechanisms of the software, for not just security reasons ( which is a compelling reason all in itself) but also for the ability to understand / change core components. However it is vitally important we do not remain critical in a constructive way to improve the software, or more importantly, improve the user experience. I disagree with the notion that one bug should not effect the global perception of Ubuntu quality. The point is, for software to be generally useful, an expected level of robustness and capability is generally expected in core features. If a bug prevents this from happening then the software is not generally useful, or at the very least, is not very usable without protracted workarounds and other annoyances. Ubuntu has a number of flawed approaches to release management and support. For example, not updating the Nvidia 169.12 driver in Hardy. 169.12 has numerous oopses and other bugs, and there subsequently has been three revisions of the driver since. Not to mention the old driver revision does not support new Nvidia cards that have been released. Or lets look at the many, many other device driver fixes in the vanilla kernel tree that have not been backported into Hardy's old kernel revision. Its wishful thinking to somehow arbitarily declare that a release is "stable" and then hardly do any device driver updates ongoing in the "support" phase. Clearly the word support isnt actual support - I think its more driven by a lack of resources to upgrade the baseline as is commonly done in Vista and Leopard. Ubuntu has tens of thousands of bugs in the bug database. Reporting bugs does not ensure that the bug is actually fixed or indeed investigated at all. Of those that are, many of those are sent up stream where they again sit like a statue and not seem to be resolved. It doesnt take much of a look at say X for example, to see the countless people complaining about X bugs that have not been fixed. Or, how X was "released" and declared "stable" with a known blocker and other bugs that could be argued to actually be blockers as well. Lets look at what the insiders are saying. A kernel hacker recently said "I'll typically read the linux-kernel list in 1000-email batches once every few days and each time I will come across multiple bug reports which are one to three days old and which nobody has done anything about! And sometimes I know that the person who is responsible for that part of the kernel has read the report" He continues on answering a question about the declining quality of Linux "I used to think it was in decline, and I think that I might think that it still is. I see so many regressions which we never fix. Obviously we fix bugs as well as add them, but it is very hard to determine what the overall result of this is.When I'm out and about I will very often hear from people whose machines we broke in ways which I'd never heard about before. I ask them to send a bug report (expecting that nothing will end up being done about it) but they rarely do.So I don't know where we are and I don't know what to do. All I can do is to encourage testers to report bugs and to be persistent with them, and I continue to stick my thumb in developers' ribs to get something done about them.I do think that it would be nice to have a bugfix-only kernel release. One which is loudly publicised and during which we encourage everyone to send us their bug reports and we'll spend a couple of months doing nothing else but try to fix them. I haven't pushed this much at all, but it would be interesting to try it once. If it is beneficial, we can do it again some other time." His name is Andrew Morton....... Linux needs to have less scatterbrain behaviour where half done things are left and the chaos moves forward to the next semi complete feature. It needs to consolidate and have a unified effort to really work on stability and bug fixing.