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

Tue Mar 14 01:59:43 GMT 2006

On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 10:18 +0100, Sander van Loon wrote:
> 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.
> 
So good to see you joining the effort! :)
> 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.
> 
Agreed
> 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.
These features are also available through launchpad.  Click on your name
in the top right corner, go to bugs, and then all reported bugs.  Or you
can query all subscribed packages/bugs.  It's quite flexible this way!
Love Launchpad, it's Canonical's baby! 

> 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
> 
> 
I would have to admit, that's rather odd.  Too bad you don't have seven
floppy drives, you could have a floppy raid (it's been done before)
> 
> 
> 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!
> 
Agreed, launchpad bugs should be filed for each of these.
> 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?
Totem-gstreamer still has quite a ways to go, unfortunately.  The best
way to help is just to post bug reports with specific examples so they
can be fixed in the appropriate gstreamer plugin.
I think there is a dll-loader for gstreamer available, but I don't
believe it's been packaged for Ubuntu yet.  Someone correct me if I'm
wrong.
> 
> 
> '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.
This is a feature that I miss very much as well, there's no way to take
a screenshot of a menu this way.  Could you post to the m-l with your
launchpad links for these bugs?  I'd like to keep tabs on some of them.
> 
> 
> 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?
> 
> 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.
> 
> 
I would also like to know this!

> 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
> 
> 
> 
This also happens to me, I have a Canon Powershot A520.  I've already
filed a bug here, please comment on it!
https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/gthumb/+bug/34157

I believe I speak for the Ubuntu community when I thank you for your
testing and bug reporting.  Hopefully we can all work together to all
the issues fixed and release a rock-solid awesome operating system!

God bless,
Lukas