beachdog's Journal: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, many small failures

I am puzzled at how my experience upgrading my Ubuntu distribution is not being reflected in reviews or news.

My experience as a long time Linux user is: Ubuntu 6.06 LTS has enough configuration errors that it shouldn't be offered as an end user distribution yet.

I upgraded from the 5.05 "Breezy Badger" Ubuntu to the 6.06 "LTS" about 6 weeks after LTS was released. After a news report mentioning a bug with the X windows driver I waited 3 weeks. Nope X was still broken.

The xserver package was still broken. It immediately broke my X display. From the ubuntu forums I got instructions to push the xserver package version back. Four hours later I got my X display back.

What has happened since then is one little application after another is coming up broken. Mostly minor changes are breaking applicatons. I have not found a single major improvement in 6.06 that compensates for the 16 hours wasted. I haven't messed with ticky tacky stuff like this since the RedHat C-compiler version problem of 5 years ago.

The agony is I am a bloody desktop user doing Craigslist job search and Rails. I actually need Google Earth to "just work".

I really am the wrong guy to back up and futz with problems like "the openGL graphics functions for the mga driver seem to be broken." For a long time now, I have depended on the Debian package system to set things up right.

The upgrade water torture ticky tack list for LTS:

- Local printing broken - required delete and reinstall printers.
- Adobe acrobat no longer being called as a firefox plugin (still broken despite messing with Preferences)
- Google earth now showing OpenGL error message (still broken)
- Matrox mga video driver, can't tell if the opengl functions needed by Google earth are working.
- mplayer stopped, requires an obscure edit to /etc/mplayer.config
- sound for YouTube videos now requires opening a new alsa package and futzing with mute settings. Desktop sounds are gone. (configuration for alsa-mixer changed).
- Firefox closes all windows (or crashes) when certain web pages are closed by the server.