my experience with testing flight 5, your experiences? and why the delay is essential

Mon Mar 13 09:18:07 GMT 2006

Hi all,

I decided to help with testing to make Dapper Drake the best Ubuntu
release yet. I'd like to share my experiences with testing Dapper flight
5 here. I wonder what other tester's experiences are.

If you ask me, the proposed delay is essential if we want a good
release. I think Dapper will have the potential to rule, but for the two
days that I have been testing I have seen some serious breakage.

Below I have written my experiences. I will report everything to
Launchpad as well in a few days. I REALLY hate Launchpad though, for
example try to find all the bugs you ever reported or posted comments
in, that's very difficult to accomplish in Launchpad. Search
functionality for bugs is extremely basic as well. In GNOME's Bugzilla
it's a lot more easy to do such things, it's much more pleasant to work
with.

Resolution not detected correctly, screen resolution dialog messed up

I have an Eizo F730 CRT monitor and a GeForce 7800GT. When Dapper
started up, I noticed it had set my monitor to the highest possible res,
1920 x 1440, while the recommended reso for my monitor is 1280 x 1024.
In the resolution dialog, resolutions are listed double.
http://www.xs4all.nl/%
7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/flight5_screenresolution.jpg

7 floppy drives

Dapper Flight 5 thought I have 7 floppy drives in my PC, but I have only
one.
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/flight5_floppies.jpg
http://www.xs4all.nl/%
7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/flight5_floppies_fstab.jpg

Rhythmbox won't play di.fm Trance mp3 stream

When I open the link to the 96 kbps mp3 stream of the Trance radio
channel from http://www.di.fm/, Rhythmbox won't play it even when I have
the necessary GStreamer plugins installed. Totem can play an mp3 on my
harddisk, so I guess it's not Gstreamer, but Rhythmbox? Rhythmbox can't
play any of the other internet radio streams which are added by default
to Rhythmbox either.

Totem annoyances

GNOME is all about sane defaults, but Totem's defaults are quite insane
if you ask me. The first time it starts up, it displays an annoying
playlist. And, the option “Automatically resize the window when a video
is loaded” is not enabled by default in the Preferences. So Totem
displays relatively high-res videos in a super small window!

When I was seeking through a vid playing in Totem, I got an “internal
data stream error” (or I just get the “The application Totem quit
unexpectedly” message) and Totem crashed. Probably a Gstreamer bug? I
really hope these showstopper bugs are going to be taken care of,
otherwise people will probably still be very unhappy with multimedia in
Dapper.

After some experimenting I identify the following problems. Video files
with the H.264 codec can be played, but as soon as you start seeking
Totem crashes. XviD and DivX works like a charm though, the included
video in the Ubuntu example content works fine as well. This probably is
because the Gstreamer plugin for H.264 is bad/ugly? And I can't find a
way to use the w32codecs with Gstreamer 0.10 in the Ubuntu docs?

'Take screenshot' doesn't have the option for a delay in the GUI anymore

The 'Take screenshot' program (I had to search for it, because it is now
moved to the Applications -> Accessoires menu) doesn't have the option
to set a delay for taking the screenshot in the GUI anymore. It was
possible in the previous GNOME. I have to use the command line for that
now. Is this another attempt of the GNOME team at feature assassination,
because they think the interface is too difficult? Another case of
so-called 'interface nazism' as Linux Torvals called it recently? IMO
it's very strange to hide such useful functionality from the UI.

The ae_xxx fonts in OpenOffice?

When I select a font in OO, I see a lot of fonts which have the ae_
prefix, but they all seem very similar. What are they good for? I
suspect they are used to display non-Latin scripts?

Session saving isn't enabled by default

I think I posted about this in Bugzilla/Launchpad before, and that I got
a reply from a Ubuntu dev that session saving would be enabled by
default in Dapper. But I just restarted my PC and discovered that my
Nautilus window I had open when I restarted, was not recovered, so
session saving is not on by default. I had to go to System ->
Preferences -> Sessions and enable “Automatically save changes to
session” there to enable it.

Automatically mount Windows partitions

I'm a hardcore gamer, and because Linux still sucks for gaming I have a
dual boot of Ubuntu with Windows XP. Unfortunately, Ubuntu does not auto
mount my Windows XP partition. I (and probably a lot more people who
have dual boots) think this is a serious annoyance in Ubuntu. I have
also used SUSE Linux in the past, and that distro has been auto mounting
my WXP partition for ages already. Why doesn't Ubuntu do this?

When copying over files from my Windows partition, I don't have write
permission for those files anymore

So I manually mounted my Windows partition as described in the Ubuntu
documentation. I copied over some stuff from my WXP partition to my own
home dir. Then it turned out that Ubuntu decided to revoke my write
permission when it copied those files. So I had to change the
permissions on all those files again. This is especially annoying if you
copy over a lot of files (say a backup of my photos collection in
F-Spot, that's 180 MB), because there is no way in Nautilus to give
write permission to all files in subdirectories as well.

Bittorrent

The official Bittorrent client provided by the Ubuntu repo is version is
3.4.2, that's a very old version. The most recent version is 4.4. My
guess is that Ubuntu still has 3.4.2 because gnome-btdownload depends on
that specific version, true? However, there are Bittorrent trackers
which ban old versions of Bittorrent, if I'm correct. So this can make
Bittorrent 3.4.2 useless. gnome-btdownload is dead , didn't have updates
for months and it's no longer developed. So my suggestion is that Ubuntu
adopts the latest version of the official Bittorrent client, 4.4. That
doesn't integrate in GNOME as well as gnome-btdownload though, but it's
better than this old version. Unfortunate that GNOME doesn't have a
decent Bittorrent client, like KDE has KTorrrent. 

Thumb mouse button doesn't work for opening links in a new tab

In Dapper my thumb mouse button on my Logitech G5 doesn't work anymore
like in Breezy, where I could use it to open links in new tabs in
Epiphany. It did work in Breezy. When I use the thumb mouse button, it
somehow doesn't open the link in a new tab, but in the current tab.

Deskbar applet

I remember manually compiling the deskbar applet from source when I was
using Breezy. i could then search using my smart bookmarks, for example
typing “wp ubuntu”, then it would open a new tab in Epiphany and search
Wikipedia for Ubuntu. However, I can't figure out how to do it in
Dapper, where Deskbar is integrated in GNOME 2.14. I can't find an
extension for it in the Deskbar preferences.

Bookmark importing in Epiphany

Before reinstalling Dapper Flight 5, I backupped my Epiphany bookmarks
from my old Dapper install, I exported it twice to both Epiphany .rdf
and Mozilla html. When I had Dapper installed, Epiphany refused to
import from those files (gave an error message that the file was
curropt, don't remember exactly). Then I tried Firefox. Firefox couldn't
import the html file either, but it could import the rdf. Then in
Epiphany I imported bookmarks from Firefox, so in the end I managed to
get my bookmarks imported with a workaround. But it's strange that Epi
can't import it's own exported files.
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/bookmarks_epi.rdf
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/bookmarks_mozilla.html

Rendering errors in Epiphany

Epiphany renders slightly different than Firefox on Windows XP.
Especially with Flash enabled, the fonts are messed up. On my previous
Ubuntu install, Epiphany used to render these pages identical to Firefox
on Windows.
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/nosnieuws_goed.jpg
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/nosnieuws_fout.jpg
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/tweakers_goed.jpg
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/tweakers_fout.jpg

Gthumb photo export creates unreadable files

I have a Canon Powershot A510, which used to work fine with F-Spot and
Gthumb when I had my previous Ubuntu install. Today I connected it to my
PC, currently using Flight 5, with a USB cable. Gthumb detected it and
came up with the dialog “A camera has been detected”. So in Gthumb's
import dialog, I chose 'Import', then an error message appeared in the
import dialog, “The path 'file:///DCIM/107CANON' is not absolute.”. My
photos are downloaded to my harddisk though. When I try to open the
imported photos on my hd, Nautilus gives me the following message:

“Cannot open img_0781.jpg

The filename "img_0781.jpg" indicates that this file is of type "JPEG
image". The contents of the file indicate that the file is of type
"plain text document". If you open this file, the file might present a
security risk to your system.

Do not open the file unless you created the file yourself, or received
the file from a trusted source. To open the file, rename the file to the
correct extension for "plain text document", then open the file
normally. Alternatively, use the Open With menu to choose a specific
application for the file.”

Also note that the exported photos are 0 bytes in size.
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/img_0781.jpg
http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Evanlonen/ubuntu_testing/img_0782.jpg