Improving Ubuntu: A Beginners Guide to Filing Bug Reports

[Rocket2DMn]

@Rocket2DMn
I understand that new developments get more attention and I'm not the type that will kick after a few days. However issues with LTS releases should definitely get more attention than issues with non-LTS releases (8.10 and 9.04) as they're aimed at the corporate world.

What would have happened if the bug was not in a newer releases? From your post I understand that there is a real chance that it would never be solved. A suggestion to upgrade to solve it will be out of the question as people have specific reasons to stick to LTS.
Slakkie has now confirmed that it's in 9.10 as well so we might be lucky.

It however leaves a very sour taste that one points out a possible problem and nobody seems to be interested. I admit, I'm probably the first one to benefit from it when it gets solved.

Further my confidence in Ubuntu has taken a serious hit as this could have easily been picked up by a simple testscript.

The thing about fixing bugs in already released versions of Ubuntu is that they need to qualify for SRU - Stable Release Update - see StableReleaseUpdates. LTS releases do seem to get more SRUs, but the bug still needs to qualify.

[guriinii]

Ta very much.

[rockstarrem]

Thanks, this helped me out a lot.

[Syed Kazim]

Thanks for the information. Glad I read this...

[kansasnoob]

I'd appreciate any recommendations regarding filing a bug report against Karmic, I think the kernel itself. Just a bit of history; I began with Karmic about Alpha 4 and all throughout the Karmic dev process I experienced random "freezes" where the only option was to do a hard restart.

I once posted about that:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1276146

No point in reading all of that, but I continued to experience "random" hard-lockups or "freezes" where absolutely nothing works other than pushing the power button on the box!

Now, it's not a huge deal to me. Jaunty has always been incredibly stable for me, and I multi-boot so I never get stuck with a totally dead machine. (I also have spare parts on hand). But I notice this is still a problem for some.

Now I upgraded Karmic to Lucid as soon as the dev string became available and I don't see that with the new Lucid kernel. I recently reinstalled Karmic for grub2 testing purposes, and there it is! The same hard-lockups or freezes!

So what I don't know is how to file an effective bug report in this situation. I had just such a "freeze" this AM and since then have not booted into Karmic so if I knew what files to attach to a bug report and how to do it I certainly would.

As I said, I could really care less that Karmic doesn't work well for me, but I realize that's not true for everyone so I feel it's important to pursue this so the devs can work it out.

After all, we need to address everyone's issues, not just our own. And this may help with future development, but a poorly written bug report is only time consuming and basically worthless.

[Rocket2DMn]

Hi kansasnoob, freezes are some of the most difficult problems to track down. I would suggest filing a bug report against the kernel, which would be the "linux" package. Also consider what you are doing when you get freezes - are you playing video (esp. flash), is your screensaver kicking on, are you using Compiz, or are you doing a suspend/resume? The triager will most likely ask you to test with Lucid, which you are doing, so if you can reproduce the problem there, that is the best approach.

[kansasnoob]

Hi kansasnoob, freezes are some of the most difficult problems to track down. I would suggest filing a bug report against the kernel, which would be the "linux" package. Also consider what you are doing when you get freezes - are you playing video (esp. flash), is your screensaver kicking on, are you using Compiz, or are you doing a suspend/resume? The triager will most likely ask you to test with Lucid, which you are doing, so if you can reproduce the problem there, that is the best approach.

Thanks for the reply. I did join an existing bug report that sounded very similar and I'm trying some unofficial updates from xorg-edgers that seem to be working well so far!

If the improvement seems to have solved this after about one week of testing I'll search for bugs filed against Karmic Xorg and see if I can help in that way.

[jenelle]

so if for some reason the web pages shut unexpectantly and when you click on the firefox icon to open again it comes up with some box saying there was a problem with a box that was just opened is that a bug ,i did have 2 or 3 boxs open have done so in past with no probs till now

or when it totally takes you out of the internet to just before you actually sign into your computer which you were in there in the first place and you have to re sign in is that a bug too ???

i did re start it so far so good i hope it doesn't do it ever again

very new at it and unsure of things when they go wrong sorry and usually wait for my brother to come over to fix it

[Rocket2DMn]

Yes, in theory any unexpected behavior is a bug, esp. if the program crashes. If you are able to reproduce these crashes, then that is an excellent time to file a bug report. Loss of network connection is also a bug, and has been known to happen with wireless more often than wired (some cards more than others, esp. Atheros cards).

[jenelle]

cool thanks , since posting that so far has not happened again , i would not know how to reproduce it either and it had never done it before and i will be quite happy if it never happens again , i do have wireless to the router [think that is right or modem ? ]
when i restarted it vanished so hope that means forever