Was Breezy rushed?

**Zotova** · October 15th, 2005

Maybe I am being unfair has it has only been out a few days... but to me Breezy feels that it was very rushed and was released simply to keep to the deadline.

Before I start I'd like to state I'm using a fresh install of Breezy and also I understand that audio and video support are not in Ubuntu from the start, that isn't my problem.

What is my problem is that the audio and video in particular is awful in Breezy. I've installed all the audio/video packages that I had in Hoary and they simply do not work. When I visit a popular video site such as gamespot.com or bbc.co.uk the streams simply do nothing. They attempt to connect but then the mplayer plugin just states it has stopped. I was using the totem plugin before and that simply stated it didn't have the right codec. I do however have the w32codecs... which my I add, why weren't they available more easily? Would it hurt to make them available via apt-get? Or if there is legal problems at least have some decent how-to so users can install them with ease. At the moment all I have found is unhelpful posts from people saying install a certain plugin but without actually saying which plugin to install!

Moving on from the video problems, what happened to the lovely Ubuntu login screen? All the fonts are now big and in my opinion ugly. Of course I suppose that is just my opinion but to me it looks a lot less professional looking than the Hoary login screen did. Also, once you login, what happened to the lovely splash screen? It is now some ugly rushed looking thing. Again, that is just my personal taste, but what happened with the font size? The first icon which loads looks like a size 6 and then the next icons text looks like a size 8?! To me that just makes me think it was rushed, silly little bugs like that shouldn't be in the final.

I would like to say I don't mean to be insulting by saying the artwork is ugly, someone has obviously put time in creating it and I aren't generally attacking that person. I just do feel Hoarys art work was a hell of a lot nicer.

Also, what happened with the boot time? It now takes around a min while my card gets an ip from the dhcp server. Fair enough this has never been a fast process but it didn't take this long in Hoary, 30 secs max.

Another problem I had this morning when turning on to try and get the flippin' video working was that my mouse was very jerky, what did I find? The update program was taking up 32% of the cpu and making my laptop very slow. In the end I had to kill the process. Why are simple things like this happening in Breezy when personally I never had any of these problems with Hoary, to me the only answer I can think of is that Breezy was rushed out the door with a lot of bugs still unfixed.

I won't go on in detail so not to bore, I'll briefly list other problems, or at least what I feel are problems.

#The new add/remove menus, very nice, but very slow to load, at least with the old one you could click advanced as soon as it appeared and the advanced add/remove would them appear - which imho is a lot better to use.

#As far as I can tell gaim 1.50 is still not included, why?, or if it is why haven't you bumped the version to 1.50 to at least put peoples minds at rest? There is no way I'm using 1.15 (I think that was the version I had to un-install from Breezy) when it has numerous security issues.

#Why aren't all the official Ubuntu repositories enabled as default? There are hardly any games, themes etc with the default repositories, if the extra ones are official and supported then why not have the enabled from the go? Makes things easier for newbies and even for experienced users as it is one less thing to do.

Finally I would like to say this isn't just a post to bitch about Ubuntu, I am a bit cranky yes lol as I was up till 3 trying to get the darn video working. I release a lot of hard work has been put in and I don't mean to say you shouldn't have bothered or anything harsh like that. I simply feel from my experience there should have been a RC2 to sort out some of the remaining problems.

Also if anyone does have a real fix for the video problem I'd love to hear it as at the moment the other video threads which are around have been no help what-so-ever.

**Synt4x_3rr0r** · October 15th, 2005

Alot of what you're saying is actually true.
The startup time was the first thing i noticed after installing Breezy for example.
But i think that thay have dona a good job with Breezy after all. It just needs a little fixing and it will be better than Hoary.

About your video problems:
In firefox i use an extension calles "MediaPlayerConnectivity"(search Mozillas pag for extensions and youll find it).
From that plugin i've chosen Xine to be the player for streaming Video and it works grate.

But you need the W32Codecs installed. But you already had those right, so it shouldn't be a prob.

**Zotova** · October 15th, 2005

Thanks for the reply. Well, I have just a few moments a go finally got streaming working in Firefox. It would appear someone gave out a link to a w32codecs package which simply did not work. Once uninstalling that one and installing a different version it has worked.

For future reference and anyone reading this thread I have provided a mirror with the codecs I found to work.

I hope these will help someone.

To install do the following:

Code:

wget http://www.shanghai.me.uk/codecs/w32codecs.deb
dpkg -i w32codecs.deb

For DVD.

Code:

wget http://www.shanghai.me.uk/codecs/dvd.deb
dpkg -i dvd.deb

I hope these mirrors are of some use and I will try to keep them up as long as I can.

**Synt4x_3rr0r** · October 15th, 2005

Originally Posted by Zotova

For DVD.

Code:

wget http://www.shanghai.me.uk/codecs/dvd.deb
dpkg -i dvd.deb

I hope these mirrors are of some use and I will try to keep them up as long as I can.

Is that for DVD playback or is it something else?
Because if it is for playback i actually found libdvdcss2 when i searched this forum(i think it was).
It came as a .deb file to so it was vary easy to install.

Sorry that i don't remember the link to the .deb but i have the.deb on my computer if you're interrested.

**helloyo** · October 15th, 2005

i agree completely. its nowhere near the standard that hoary set. when i install a distro and i have to fix everything in site, no matter how easy, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. i had to fix my resolution (xorg.conf), get scroll working on my mouse (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg), get wmv working (downloading codecs from mplayerhq.hu) and a couple other things. how is a newbie going to know how to do those things? i barely know how to do those things.

i love the concept of a big stable distro that everyone has and uses as a base for everything but this one didn't win me over. i am going to try out mandriva, i will probably be back, but depending on the polish, i may not be.

**Zotova** · October 15th, 2005

Originally Posted by Synt4x_3rr0r

Is that for DVD playback or is it something else?
Because if it is for playback i actually found libdvdcss2 when i searched this forum(i think it was).
It came as a .deb file to so it was vary easy to install.

Sorry that i don't remember the link to the .deb but i have the.deb on my computer if you're interrested.

Sorry, yes, that is for dvd playback - I just renamed it for ease.

**Synt4x_3rr0r** · October 15th, 2005

Originally Posted by helloyo

i agree completely. its nowhere near the standard that hoary set. when i install a distro and i have to fix everything in site, no matter how easy, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. i had to fix my resolution (xorg.conf), get scroll working on my mouse (dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg), get wmv working (downloading codecs from mplayerhq.hu) and a couple other things. how is a newbie going to know how to do those things? i barely know how to do those things.

i love the concept of a big stable distro that everyone has and uses as a base for everything but this one didn't win me over. i am going to try out mandriva, i will probably be back, but depending on the polish, i may not be.

Ah, common, If you don't like having to set things up manually then you shouldn't use linux at all.
Ok, I think it should be easier for newbs to, but you can't just switch to Linux and think it will be a walk in the park.
At least not yet.

**ElVirolo** · October 15th, 2005

I totally agree ... Many things that worked under Hoary simply don't under Breezy (scanner, printer, webcam, internet connection with static IP)...

**GeneralZod** · October 15th, 2005

I'm not an Ubuntu developer, but I think that Breezy has been a very difficult release for a couple of reasons:

a) Compiler transition - GCC 4.0.x is, I gather, rather more stringent than previous versions, so probably a lot of packages had to be tweaked at the source level to work with it; and most importantly
b) xorg changes. The modularisation of xorg sounds like it has been a fairly epic task and for a very long time, Breezy testers had no easily accessible GUI, which probably put a lot of people off testing.

Plus, miscellaneous bits and bobs like definite legal issues over things like libdecss and w32codecs; the transition to Cairo as a GTK back-end; etc.

I would personally have been happy to wait for an extra fortnight or so while things were being cleared up, especially as a Kubuntu user - a number of Kubuntu-specific issues have cropped up (like the inability to switch to admin user for certain tasks which afflicted Hoary also, and the lack of HAL-awareness) that are pretty close to being show-stoppers, in my humble opinion.

I gather that with Dapper, the focus will be more on getting things polished and bug-free, with as few risky new technologies as possible. Here's hoping!