The thing with Ubuntu

I've been playing with Ubuntu (Dapper and Edgy) since Dapper was released last summer, and at least the Edgy experience has left me with the impression that the developers behind the project are truly overwhelmed by their task.

The Ubuntu forums are full with people that don't know much about Linux, all screaming for help, yet no developers seem to listen. Launchpad, you say? I can name two critical(I would say) bugs which don't seem to have been even reviewed by any Ubuntu developer.

In bug 78282, somebody broke vnc4server with a security update. That was almost one month ago. Whatever happened to that? Well, nothing. Every once in a while there's a new angry user complaining, and that's all. Oh, at least they confirmed it, and set the severity to 'high', which is a very nice consolation to people who have to still deselect 'vnc4server' from their update list. It would've been really hard to pull back the update, wouldn't it?

In bug 67998, Dapper to Edgy upgrades break the ALSA configuration. In this way, all apps are only able to use OSS output. Critical, you say? Check out the bug report, it is labeled as 'Low importance'! Yet it affects all soundcards without hardware mixing! And most of all, nobody gives a damn!

Whatever happened to 'Linux for human beings'? How can you connect with users if (as far as I can tell) almost none of the devs hang out on the forums, or even look in bug reports? My impression is the team is a bit overwhelmed by the number of users they have, and they focus on stuff reported by people in companies which pay support contracts (check out the latest bug in some libc scripts, for example, quite minor compared to the above - Matt Zimmerman is all over it). However, how can you be encouraged to contribute, if all your bug reports are ignored? If the Ubuntu team is short on people, they should focus on listening to people, not on turning them away to other distros.

Oh, there's also bug 42555, but that's a small potato compared to the others. Despite the fact that sysklogd had been repeatedly reported as broken by people in the know about DNS, ubuntu-minimal still depends on sysklogd, and nothing else. I submitted a patch in that thread so the dependency shifts to 'system-log-daemon', a virtual package that depends on either sysklogd or, for example, syslog-ng, which fixed the BIND/sysklogd problem out of the box.

I can understand that an OSS project depends on volunteers, but maybe they need to try a bit better to give people the impression that somebody's listening. The Feisty section on the Ubuntu forums reflects some quite bitter disappointment at the upcoming Ubuntu release.

"Use Dapper for stability", you say? I'm not looking for rock solid stuff here, just something that doesn't break in the most stupid kind of way, and that developers will fix once they realize it was broken.

Troubleshooting file and printer sharing in (yes, you read right) Windows XP

At my father's house where I'm currently staying there are two computers running Windows (one XP Pro, one XP Home). The XP Pro machine is dual-booting with Linux, but my father needs it to run mostly under Windows. They are connected and some folders are shared. The XP pro machine acts as a server, using ICS , for the other machine.

I've always had problems with the MS way of setting up network shares, because in many cases the errors that come up are obscure and the error messages aren't informative at all.

Since now there is NTFS write support for Linux (see http://www.ntfs-3g.org), I decided to convert the two FAT32 partitions on the server to NTFS.

There were two problems:

Quoting from Knowledge base article 304040:

Remote users may receive an "Access Denied" message on a share that they had connected to successfully before. This behavior occurs after the hard disk is converted to NTFS. This behavior occurs on Windows XP-based computers that have Simple File Sharing turned on that were upgraded from Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition, or Windows Millennium Edition. This behavior occurs because the default permissions of a hard disk that is converted to NTFS do not contain the Everyone group. The Everyone group is required for remote users who are using the Guest account to access the files To reset the permissions, unshare and reshare the affected folders.

Well, they could've made the error message more informative, ain't it so?

Then, I couldn't access anything on the XP Home machine, which is my father's laptop. It seems the Guest account is required to be on (from KB 308007, see "Troubleshooting file and printer sharing"):

Note: All network access to either a Windows XP Home Edition-based computer in a workgroup or to a Windows XP Professional-based computer in a workgroup uses the Guest account. Before you continue troubleshooting, make sure that the Guest account is set up for network access.

This can be checked with 'net user guest', as the article goes on to explain. I seem to have needed to turn on the guest account on the XP home machine in the Users dialog, even though it seems that's not needed (also from KB304040):

If you turn off the Guest account in the User Accounts Control Panel tool, only the guest's ability to log on locally is affected. The account is not disabled.

Hmm, that part I might need to go over again, since 'net user guest' was showing the account to be enabled. Hm.

Anyway, now everything seems to work, thank God.