Yesterday I tried to upgrade my "leisure" computer to the beta of Ubuntu Jaunty. Intrepid (8.10) was already disappointing, but this one is so bad I'm considering switching to another distribution. Granted, it's a beta, but I have so many huge issues with it I really doubt they will all (if any) be resolved before the final.
I won't detail the dozen (most of them minor) issues I have, but here are a few chosen problems which I am baffled they passed QA tests.
Evince (and possibly other gnome programs) print out of the page margins. Something like 4cm too high. Lpr work fine though but it's not as practical/user friendly. It's probably an issue with A4 vs US paper sizes, as usual. The difference being that previously it defaulted to US but worked fine if you choose A4. Now it seems to default to A4 but prints wrong. Great.
Skype doesn't work. First I had to remove my .asoundrc file so that it even starts without segfaulting. But then all text of the interface was garbled. A problem with QT and 64bit? Trying Medibuntu's 64bit version didn't help either. What did help is install Medibuntu's static version. But now I have the choice between having sound in the left speaker only if I use the default device, or having both channels but skype using 100% of my CPU while in conversation. Say everything you want (it's non free etc...) but it worked previously, what new feature was worth breaking whatever API is broken now?
And last but not least: you can't quit that flawed OS! Binding together the "switch user" applet with a logout icon was stupid enough (If i wanted both icons next to each other, I could have place the switch user applet next to the logout applet, right?), but now they've gone as far as removing the shutdown, hibernate, suspend and logout options from the System menu (if the applet is present). Since I use the applet, but had hidden those options from the applet (through gconf), I was left with no (clean) way to quit my desktop. It took me a while to figure out what the ---- was happening. What irritates me the most is that the upstream applet is great.
Update: To be fair, I should follow-up and say that on my laptop (that I only upgraded after the dust settled), everything went very smoothly. There are still the Fast User Switch Applet changes that I strongly disagree with, but overall it's been a solid release as far as this particular computer is concerned.
Since I need to develop an application on Oracle, I tried to install Oracle XE on my laptop. Their installation process is quite straightforward, though after you configure it once through their "installer", you can't reconfigure it through it. The installation went smoothly (or so I thought):
Starting Oracle Net Listener...Done Configuring Database...Done Starting Oracle Database 10g Express Edition Instance...Done Installation Completed Successfully. To access the Database Home Page go to "http://127.0.0.1:8079/apex"
except that accessing the "database homepage" (a local webserver provided by the database server so that you can easily interact with it) wouldn't work.
After a lot of digging around, I discovered that the "listener" was failing to start (the above message doesn't really look like anything failed), and got at the error message in /usr/lib/oracle/xe/app/oracle/product/10.2.0/server/network/log/listener.log (logging to /var/log would have been far too obvious).
Error listening on: (DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=IPC)(KEY=EXTPROC_FOR_XE))) TNS-12555: TNS:permission denied TNS-12560: TNS:protocol adapter error TNS-00525: Insufficient privilege for operation Linux Error: 1: Operation not permitted
And the cause of this failure was that I had already installed oracle XE on this machine a few months ago, and if you uninstall (purge) the package it seems like it leaves some junk in /var/tmp/.oracle
This caused the sEXTPROC_FOR_XE file in that directory (left from my previous installation) to have a bad user/group. Thanks to Oracle for their very clear error messages...
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