My Feisty regressions, what are yours?

I’m currently running the development version of Ubuntu, codenamed Feisty. The final version was planned to be released on April 19th, but this might change since the RC has already been postponed.

There seems to be no official announcement what exactly causes the delay, but I have some ideas, because there are some problems I’m currently experiencing myself:

  1. The newest Kernel is broken
    I’m currently running the 2.6.20-13 Linux kernel since the newer ones fail to boot. They spit out some error about the superblock and when I press Ctrl+D (which is what I’m told to do) my PC boots but fails to mount my /home, which leaves the system essentially unusable.
  2. My DVD drive doesn’t work
    At some point my DVD drive stopped working. I say at some point because I haven’t used it for weeks, but I wanted to yesterday and it didn’t work. When I insert a disk it doesn’t automatically mount and clicking on the drive only gives me “Unable to mount media. There is probably no media in the drive.”
  3. The Nvidia drivers don’t work
    Maybe this isn’t a bug of it’s own and related to the Kernel problem, but my X doesn’t start with the (restricted) Nvidia drivers.
  4. The Totem video plugin doesn’t play anything
    Totem is a great Media Player both interface-wise and using the Xine backend also with regards to format support. The standalone player works fine for me (except that it used to support the sound in Real videos), but the Firefox plugin doesn’t work at all anymore. It loads but doesn’t play the video or audio file.

I don’t know what the Ubuntu developers’ current plan is, but I really hope that they focus on the quality of Ubuntu and don’t rush out a release.

What do you think about this? Is Feisty working fine for you or are you also experiencing bugs? Leave a comment or write a blog post of your own.

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10 Comments

  1. Everything in the feisty beta works fine for me

    kernel 2.6.20-15 works completely fine for me. I never had an error with 14 either. My dvd drive works, I use intel graphics and those work fine and I don’t use totem for video, I use mplayer and vlc player. Mplayer for wmv and real media (and streaming) and vlc player for avi, mpeg, and anything else I may come across.

  2. Had no issues so far with Feisty.

    Currently, I’m using 2.6.20-14 kernel, and it just works.
    Yesterday I used my dvd drive with no problems – it just worked.
    Can’t speak about the Nvidia drivers though….maybe they do have bugs, but they are not FLOSS.
    I don’t use Totem; Mplayer, Gxine, Xine-ui work perfectly for me.

  3. Hi Tim,

    I’ve had some of the same experiences, but it helps to be constructive about it:

    1: check launchpad.net for bugs that sound similar and post your vital details there for the kernel developers to help debug what’s going wrong (I had exactly similar experiences with some of the kernels):
    try e.g.:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.20/+bug/97325

    2: is the DVD player SATA or IDE? Is it connected to the same controller as your /home drive? If yes to the latter question, this may be related to your bug#1. Again: post your details (e.g. output of the dmesg and lspci -vvn commands) on launchpad

    3: Your nvidia drivers / linux kernel restricted modules MIGHT have been updated along with your kernel to a later version, which would cause this problem. Check ubuntuforums for more info on quick fixes

    4: Try visiting https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats

  4. Anders Jacobsen:
    Thank you for your suggestions, although I am aware of Launchpad and already used it to research my bugs I realized that I can do a little bit more.

    But here a more detailed response:

    1. There are lots and lots of bug reports on launchpad about this and many discussions in the Ubuntu forums. The bug I am experiencing has defintely been reported and thought it would be the best not to add a new report unless I really have to contribute something, which I haven’t.
    2. It is IDE and has its own controller. I will dig a little deeper in the launchpad for this one and post the information you suggested.
    3. The Nvidia drivers have been updated, but I still have the appropriate restricted-modules package for my kernel, so it should work as I understand it, but don’t quote me on that one
    4. It’s definately not a codec problem, the Totem standalone player (i.e. not the plugin) works just fine. I opened a bug report:
    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/totem/+bug/107050

  5. The only bug that I have had was when I was connected with a static connection it showed the connection as disconnected but the connection still worked. When I was connected DHCP it would show that it was connected properly. With yesterday’s update, it was fixed. I have been on board with feisty since herd3. I am really enjoying 7.04. I had a lot of problems with 6.1 so I went back to 6.06 until Feisty herd3. For those out there still having problems, that list is getting shorter. They have doe a great job with this version IMO.

  6. I also have been having problems with totem’s firefox plugin. in the end, i switched to mplayer for firefox. i don’t believe this is a regression, however. my roommate has edgy on his computer, and totem was causing him the same firefox grief. so yeah, purge totem-mozilla from your system, and install the mozilla-mplayer package instead. as far as standalone players go, totem and mplayer perform about the same for me. a previous poster also suggested vlc, but that program has never played nice with beryl in my experience.

  7. Nvidia drivers, RAID arrays vanished, gnome main menu resized itself to 3×3 pixels, network connections is strange: e.g. will it work this reboot or not? (Have to change IP number, then change it back.) I ended up booting the 2.6.20-15-386 kernel with nvidia drivers, but now I only have 1 core on my CPU. Time spent so far: 16 real time hours.

  8. I feel your pain. Feisty handles suspend/hibernate and wireless stuff far better than Edgy, and there are little cosmetic improvements everywhere, but that’s all the good news. VMWare Player doesn’t work at all — it won’t run after I reboot unless I reconfigure, and it broke my net connection — but you expect that with proprietary software. But the failure to automount is a serious problem, especially since even manually mounting doesn’t seem to work completely. It really looks like the people behind Ubuntu decided to imitate Windows Vista here: it’s not remotely ready for release, and they should be sacked and replaced by people with some understanding of regression testing.

    And no, I don’t think the Ubuntu forums are any good. They’re filled with people complaining about the same problems, but people who actually have solutions are nowhere to be seen. Ugly, ugly situation.

  9. The ATI drivers don’t work either (they used to work in Feisty beta’s). Wonder what went wrong. I hope they make a 7.04.1 release quick to correct these silly but absolutely disturbing issues. I almost showed Ubuntu to a client and I’m glad I decided to test it first… 😐

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