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...
A few weeks ago, I finally upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu Hardy (8.04). I had already upgraded my Desktop computer on the day of the release but given the numerous issues I had with the new version, I didn't switch my laptop (on which I work) yet. In my opinion, this was one the single most problematic release of Ubuntu ever (and I've been an Ubuntu user since its very first release). Since I had not seen any issue with my desktop computer for a while, and that I wanted firefox 3 (mainly for its increased javascript execution speed), I've given the current version a spin.
The upgrade went quite smoothly. I only wish the upgrade manager asked all questions (mostly about changes in system config files, most of them I didn't even do myself) at the beginning then work in the background without interrupting me.
Now with the actual title of this post... So, after the switch to Firefox 3, I soon discovered that one javascript application I'm working on (the client for OpenHexperience) didn't work anymore. I had a blank page, that's it. No error whatsoever. I soon found out that my javascript code wasn't called at all. Inline javascript worked fine but any code included in an external file was just silently ignored. After 3 hours of hair-pulling debugging, I finally understood the issue. It turns out it was Firefox 3's new pickiness at closing tags. It didn't like the way my script tag was closed in my simple html (not xhtml) bootstrap page.
<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/ohxp.js"/>
It wants an explicit closing tag, as in:
<script type="text/javascript" src="/script/ohxp.js"></script>
I'm all for respecting standards, and I've often bitched at IE for accepting totally invalid markup, but hell, introducing such a change without any error anywhere is almost a crime to humanity.
Now, what made this issue especially hard to debug was that I tried the correct version in my template very early in my debugging process, but it didn't fix my problem, leading me to search elsewhere. The culprit here was my memory... I completely forgot Genshi serialized to xml by default, and diligently replaced the empty script tag (with the explicit closing tag) by the shortcut syntax for empty tags... Exactly what Firefox doesn't want. As is often the case, once understood, fixing this issue was dead simple. One of the possible solutions is simply to tell Genshi to serialize to html, by changing:
return tmpl.generate(**data).render(doctype="html")
to
return tmpl.generate(**data).render("html", doctype="html")
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