Alpha 3 testing report

[Otto Kekäläinen]

Hello,

I know I should probably file bugs for these issues I found, but they  
seem rather obvious, so I'd like to check first if it's something that  
everybody encounters?

Testing Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Alpha 3:
- After booting the Desktop CD, a dialog with "A volume with softeware  
packages has been detected" comes up. Not very welcoming to a new user  
launching the Desktop Cd.. This dialog should shown at all when  
running a live CD and certainly not should the live CD "detect itself".

- The installer has a button "Update the installer". When I press it  
while there is no network connection, it shows some dialog running  
some update, but after that nothing happends and the button just goes  
grey. I'd expect it to complain about not beeing able to connect to  
the repo servers.

- After I press "Next" on the last screen of the installer (where it  
shows a listing about what it's about to do) the installer windows  
just disappears and nothing happends. It does not leave any processes  
running and it didn't install anything. Tested this again today and  
the problem is still there.

(I finally installed Lucid with the alternative disc text-mode installer.)

- After an update yesterday the boot process ends up in a black screen  
with a cursor blinking. Going to a command line console with  
Alt+Ctrl+F1 and back to X with F7 unravels the desktop, where  
everything seems fine (I've enabled autologin).

- While using Lucid, many apps just plain crash and bring up the  
automatic crash reportin tool. Are all the apps I've tried buggy or is  
there some background mechanism that crashes a lot of stuff?

- On one computer the sound volume icon is grey (muted) even though  
the sound works fine and I can increase/decrease the volume with  
hardware keys and there is correct on screen feedback. On another  
computer I tried the sound volume icon works correctly.

- Playing DVD's is difficult. Totem correctly notifies that it's  
missing a the DSS-library then I insert a DVD, but it does not how to  
install it. Opening the help central from the blue question mark icon  
and setting "DVD" as the search term does not show anything relevant.  
Only expert user like me know how to install libdvdnav and then run  
the command line to install libdvdcss. Even after that Totem complains  
about a missing mpeg demuxer, but it does not suggest to install the  
missing codec. Again only an expert user like me understands to  
install some gstreamer codecs from Synaptic/apt-get.

- The live CD seems to have both The Disk utility and GParted. The  
former alone would be enough.


-- 
Otto Kekäläinen
www.sange.fi