2007-Nov-07

Upgraded an Ubuntu system today. It modified my /etc/fstab to add a duplicate device but with a new mount point. It couldn't handle a PPD file under /etc/ so I had to manually move it. And evms or udevd is broken. See https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.22/+bug/115616

My experiences with Ubuntu are quite frustrating especially since I have around ten years experience with Debian. (Today I read an article about OpenBSD being too hard -- different strokes for different folks -- because for me the BSDs are a lot easier than Ubuntu :)

On a NetBSD system ... Tried to play an AVI with mplayer and my jwm, firefox and all of my X desktop locked up. I ssh'd in and killed mplayer, firefox, and jwm. And back at X I typed "jwm &" in a xterm that was running. Then firefox would just hang. So I ktraced it. I saw it was looking at /var/tmp/orbit-reed/ where I had several linc-* files -- some months old. I deleted all of these sockets. Firefox started after complaining (twice):

GConf Error: Adding client to server's list failed, CORBA error:
IDL:omg.org/CORBA/COMM_FAILURE:1.0

Also I suggested for pkgsrc in September something like the following:

pkg_summary(5) can be extended to add two optional variables that are defined in the respective Makefiles:

PREV_PKGBASE for previous package name(s)

PREV_PKGPATH for previous PKGPATH(s)

If a tool searching for a PKGBASE (or PKGNAME) didn't find it, it could next search for PREV_PKGBASE to find out new PKGNAME. Also this would help with conflicts: ignore the CONFLICTS if the PREV_PKGBASE had the same PKGBASE as the CONFLICTS. I don't think any one complained about this. I may start adding support and documentation for these in a few days.