What’s Been Bugging you in Ubuntu 8.10?
When it’s about time for a new version of Ubuntu to arrive, usually I end up installing a late alpha or beta version before the final release. This wasn’t the case with Ubuntu 8.10, so I’ve had a pretty smooth transition. Recently I did get time to take a stab at working out some of the issues I have been having.
Desktop effects can’t be enabled after using external monitor
(bug report)
Ubuntu’s desktop effects have always worked well on my Eee PC 901 laptop. But
since plugging it into a TV via the VGA port, Compiz will not start even after
the switching back to the internal display.
Attempting to enable effects causes Ubuntu to report “Desktop effects could not
be enabled”. Running compiz from the terminal reports “Software rasterizer
detected”.
This seems to be caused by the screen resolution utility changing my xorg.conf file in ways that break Compiz. I removed this section from my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:
SubSection "Display"
Virtual 2384 768
EndSubSection
After logging out I’m able to enable effects again.
[update] I tried using a TV again and was able to work around this problem by not enabling both screens at the same time. However, I did have a new problem. The external monitor would randomly go blank after being connected for a few minutes. I could only get it working again by rebooting Ubuntu. This seems to be a well known issue. (bug report)
Bluetooth mouse doesn’t reconnect
(bug report)
I have to remove and re-pair my Bluetooth mouse to get it to connect with Ubuntu
after waking my laptop up from suspend. Recent updates seem to have fixed this!
PulseAudio issues
Every now and then I will find that I’ve lost all sound playback. It seems that PulseAudio is crashing; System Monitor will report futex_wait in the waiting channel column (which seems to be what most crashed applications will say).
To work around this, I kill PulseAudio with System Monitor, and then run
pulseaudio using the Run Application dialog.
Flash Video issues
Sometimes when I try to play a Flash video playback will start and stop after two seconds. Restarting Firefox usually fixes this for a while. This problem could be related to PulseAudio.
Audio-in with Skype
(forum thread)
I had Skype working fine on Ubuntu 8.04, but now I can’t get it to capture any
audio. By setting all the sound device options to pulse in Skype’s settings, I
can get audio-out working but not audio-in. This is probably another PulseAudio
issue.
Firefox hangs after closing
A few times I’ve had Firefox appear to close normally, but it hangs and stays running in the background. I haven’t found a way to reproduce this behavior.
Have any of these issues been bugging you in Ubuntu 8.10? I’ll update this post as I find solutions or run into new problems.
Archived Comments
Anonymous
Yes, sound has been a real thorn in the side of 8.10. I like most everything else over 8.04, but at least sound worked in 8.04. I’ve had everything from sound playing at the wrong frequency, to it dropping out altogether (like you mention in your post). And Skype broke for me too, also audio related :(
Eric Kiel
I’ve had issues with Firefox appearing to close only for the next time I launch it, it says it didn’t close properly. I did have some issues with PulseAudio and Audacity, but that was resolved by suspending PulseAudio as you can see here: http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#Audacity
Great blog!
Grego
Buggy Hibernation/Suspend
Anonymous
My mouse pad doesn’t function out of the box, nor my wireless connection and the Windows key.
Vadim P.
Tabs are great, however there is no option to make the file browser open new *tabs*, instead of the current “open a new window” behavior.
Scott Wegner
Hi Tom,
Although I haven’t found a relevant bug report, I’ve also experience the Firefox “hang”. It will appear to close down completely, but is still present in the System Monitor, and generally churning at about 50% CPU. I believe it may be related to running Java applets in a Firefox session prior to closing.
Howard
I’m having many of these PulseAudio issues and I’m still running 8.04. I hate how Ubuntu rushes ahead with new technologies they don’t quite understand or know how to properly test and integrate, just so they can say “oh, we’ve had feature ‘x’ since version ‘y’!” They did it with Compiz in 7.10, and again now with PulseAudio in 8.04 (and appearently 8.10). When are they going to get their act together and realize that “cutting-edge feature-richness” should not translate into promising more than you can deliver.
ghm
My experience with 8.10 is that gnome/kde is much slower than in 8.04. Firefox 3
is espacially slow, slow menus etc. I don’t know what’s causing this. Some
forums suggest that it’s buggy nvidia drivers. I’m thinking about downgrading to
8.04 on my stationary pc.
By the way. Love your site. I have it as rss in my statusbar i firefox. Keep up
the good work!
-Gerhard
Norway
Dr. Steve
About the Firefox hanging after closing, I get this sometimes and I am running XP 64-bit. And I got it on my old system as well. I believe it’s a firefox issue that comes from closing it when you had a lot of windows/tabs open. For me, it goes away pretty quickly.
iampriteshdesai
Hi Tom!
Been a long time since you last posted!
I have this problem with all Ubuntu + Kubuntu where at the time of booting ,
booting fails and I enter this busybox. Which says
“Type help for list of commands”
I get it few times, but it goes on rebooting.
Apart from it ibex has been great.
I even managed to run the Opera Mini browser full screen on it!
BCK
Just had the audio issue this morning, woke up and no sound. Also had some audio out issues, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. The firefox bug seems to plague all systems as I’ve had the issue in both XP and vista
MattP
PulseAudio seems to be intermittently broken on my Thinkpad T43. Never had a problem with 8.04, but I often don’t have audio in 8.10. Have to run alsamixer and play with the master volume, then audio sometimes returns, but not always. Anyway - PulseAudio is definitely flakey on 8.10.
scroobious
In general I’m pretty happy, but:
- For some time now, I’ve had to compile the latest ALSA drivers in order to get surround sound on my laptop. ALSA comes in the kernel, but it’s just not compiled correctly. It’s been like this for the past few versions. At least in this one, it works better than ever after I compile it from source; it actually cuts all the speakers when I plug in headphones.
- There’s a bit of a regression with NetworkManager. This isn’t Ubuntu’s fault; there are all sorts of bugs about this NM’s own bugzilla. Basically, it won’t accept p12 files anymore, so a lot of people on secure university networks can’t get on the network anymore.
- That brought up a new issue for me; I had to go on the insecure network at my university, and my machine kept locking up. The solution, I read, was to install backports, but backports broke NetworkManager. After a lot of hunting and pecking, I found that I had to remove the proposed updates from my sources.list, purge and re-install a few things, and since then it’s been a dream.
- Lastly, they’re still working out the whole screen dimming thing on laptops. Mine cycles through a whole lot of shades, bright and dim, before it stops. But I can get a bright or dim screen with no real problem.
- Oh my god, I wish I knew why sometimes I can type half a sentence and it doesn’t appear, and when it finally does start to appear, the punctuation I put at the end of the sentence appears in the middle of the stuff that didn’t appear until after I finished writing the sentence. THAT is really annoying, especially for someone like me who writes a lot It’s not specific to 8.10, though, and I’ve not gotten a good reason or solution. People keep telling me to turn off the touchpad, which confirms my belief that most people can’t freakin’ read or comprehend what they read, because this isn’t about the touchpad, it’s about the keyboard actually registering the keystrokes as they’re typed.
Otherwise, suspend/hibernate work, things are fairly slick, and I’m a happy camper.
Anonymous
I have some similar audio problems.
Also, whenever I start the Screensaver utility to change the settings, the whole systems crashes BAD. The only way to escape here is holding down the power button.
And also, I run Songbird 1.0 which is great but crashes way more than 0.7!
Omegamormegil
I mostly use an older Dell laptop (Inspiron 1300), and I can no longer play some games, such as Glest, due to horrible performance issues since my upgrade. Even Wesnoth is lagging. Fortunately, gaming isn’t a huge priority for me. I also have problems using Firefox, as my CPU hits 100% for ~5 seconds for no apparent reason while I’m browsing (it just happened as I was writing this comment). I’m still trying to track down the cause. I’ve read that performance has gotten progressively worse with the past few Ubuntu releases on Phoronix. Perhaps it’s affecting me more than most due to my oldish hardware. In spite of the issues, I’m sticking with 8.10 due to significantly improvement wireless connectivity. Hopefully the Jackalope will live up to it’s reputation and resolve these performance issues.
Timmy Macdonald
Oh, THANK YOU for being somebody else with the Firefox problem. It bites me twice–when I try to launch it again I get an error about how it’s already running…when it shouldn’t be.
I’ve also noticed that a perfectly fine display in Hardy is ever-so-slightly stretched horizontally in Intrepid.
Josh
I had many of the same issues – particularly audio and flash – but the most annoying was this bug (which also affected Hardy): https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/88746
It actually forced me to quit using Ubuntu. :(
reswob
I have the same problem in 8.04 and I’m going the check Pulse Audio next time it happens. I used to just log off and log back in to correct it. Maybe your solution is a bit better.
I’ve also noticed that if one app is using the sound, no other app can us it. For example, if I’m playing music through Banshee, I cannot pause and listen to something in Firefox. I must exit one app completely to playback in another app. Anyone else seen this?
Anonymous
Pulseaudio. I just uninstalled it, and suddenly World of Warcraft was much faster, without sound glitches, and I was able to use Skype again.
Helge
In Ubuntu I have some issues with Miro, Firefox, flash and sometimes sound just as you stated more or less. I can live with it, it is only slightly annoying.
In Kubuntu I have even more issues with the above and rar-files too, they don’t unpack properly. Oh, and Kubuntu is sadly slow and sluggish and it had lots of plasma crashes. Looks promising though but I had to give it up and move to Ubuntu for now.
Also I can’t find a video editor that is ok for me. Either to complicated or to simple. Kdenlive looks promising but it has a long way to go.
Last thing, Adept in Kubuntu didnt work properly either so I had to install Synaptic. It used to be really good and now it is really bad, many repositories didnt show up etc.
Anonymous
Additionally noted issues:
Jittery screen redraws when opening/changing applications (most notably when starting Wine apps).
When sound is muted, startup process (when startup sound would normally play) produces a scatchy, static like sound at low volume).
The screen issue may be related to resolution (1400X900) on my laptop, but it and the sound issue are brand new in 8.10.
No other glitches to report. Keep up the excellent work!
Anonymous
My only issues are two.
1) App loads (and sometimes window switches) produce jittery screens (desktop or app), most notably when starting up Wine processes. My screen resolution is 1400X900 and may relate to that.
2) If I start up with muted sound, I get a scratchy, static-like sound from the speaker when you would expect the startup sound to play.
No other noted issues.
sparks40
Although pulse audio seems to work pretty well, I still can’t get video to work correctly under Skype. There was an update of 7 files indicated earlier today which I installed on my machine, including I believe libv4l. Although hope springs eternal, it did not solve the video problem.
dixon
As for skype I use pulse as sound out, but HDA Intel as sound in. If you set it up like this , everything is working as expected.
Jonathan
A lot of people have been having problems with webcams, since it seems that GSPCA is broken. My sn9c102 webcam worked fine on Hardy but is no longer detected in Intrepid: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/280657
I think it applies for ALL webcams that use GSPCA, which is quite a few.
Kris
Haven’t had that problems wtih my Bluetooth mouse, but have had the same Flash problem.
Two things bug me:
1. I have to unmount my Canon DSLR before I can import photos using digikam or
F-Spot. (In previous versions of Ubuntu, it didn’t ever mount – I’m sure I
could figure out how to not mount the camera, but… meh.)
2. Cheese doesn’t work with my built-in webcam. I know that Ubuntu plays nice
with it, because I use it in other programs (VLC, for example), so Cheese is the
problem.
Mrrix32
- (Same Machine, Dual Booted) it’s 3825kbs
- (Same Machine, Dual Booted) it’s 3825kbs
- (Same Machine, Dual Booted) it’s 3825kbs
- (Same Machine, Dual Booted) it’s 3825kbs
- ne, Dual Booted) it’s 3825kbs
:( I really want to use it but it’s really annoying :(
Alex
I have the exact same pulseaudio problems. It’s really annoying because, like you say it messes with my firefox session (I regularly have 10+ tabs open, and I hibernate a lot, so firefox doesn’t get closed).
And yes, I have the same flash video problem, and I can only assume it’s related to the pulseaudio problems. When plseaudio goes down (and even after a restart of pulseaudio) flash is done for in firefox, so that’s a restart. In fact, flash used to crash my firefox (especially seesmic, but also some audio-only plugins on the bbc news website!) so I updated to some other version. (Either I had the repo version and upgraded to real adobe-provided, or the other way around.)
The annoying thing about that was hat firefox crash recovery stopped working at some point after installing 8.10. The crash recovery worked and recovered the session - but the session wasn’t being remembered, so it was a bit lame for crash recovery. I I closed firefox and reopened it’d remember, and that would be the new recovery position. SO I could do a load of browsing and tab opening and closing and it’d crash and restore to the last time I closed normally. I’ve since enabled tabmixplus’s crash recovery because it actually works!
And finally, yes, I get the same firefox hangs on closing and disappears but is still running thing you get. My assumption is that that is also based on the pulseaudio thing - maybe if the pulseaudio server goes down during that session of firefox then it still has some open handles or something on the old server and thus cannot exit. I dunno, I’m certainly no expert.
As for submitting bug report for all of this - launchpad makes me cry. I think there is already a bug report for the 2 second thing, and I think it’s a known issue everywhere that pulseaudio is pretty b0rked on 8.10. Hopefully 9.04 will save me, as the so-called upgrade to 8.10 has only meant things break for me, and as far as I can tell, nothing’s improved!
Sorry to vent on you blog but that feels so much better!
Xavier Sala
Wireless connection to WPA/WPA2 with Intel cards forces me to downgrade laptops
laird
Tom,
I have the same problem with my external 19” LCD and my thinkpad x60s. I too found the issue in some sort of conflict between xorg and compiz, but I don’t want to have to decide between effects and dual-display. Please tell me if you find any solution; I personally cannot believe this bug hasn’t been fixed yet; it seems to affect many extremely popular laptops with integrated graphics.
Laird
Anonymous
The matter of fact, I just did experience the FF problem, and it’s so annoying that you can do nothing about it but restart :S
Eirik Newth
There are several issues bugging me. Like this bug - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/289581 -, which strikes several times a week and effectively cripples Ubuntu by filling up the root partition with error logs. Serious crap like I’ve never seen before with Linux.
Or the total lack of stability of the NVidia driver. OK, I’m using a proprietary driver and know what that means, but 8.04 played so much nicer with the previous driver. Among other things, it allowed you to store your newly generated xorg.conf file, which 8.10 did not do for me by default.
I also suspect the NVidia driver is behind the one to two system freezes I experience on a daily basis, which makes 8.10 my most unstable OS since Windows 98. A sad realisation for someone who has used Linux exclusively since 2001.
Mahyar
The user switcher thing (with the red button) doesn’t allow you to shut down if you’ve switched users. You have to either use the grey button from the menu or log off with the red button, go to the login page and shut down from there.
It’s a bit silly.
Vish
I have issues. Sometimes while shutting down, I don’t get the splash screen, the screen is blank.
Gnome-Panel crashes for no reason occasionally due to segfault. Still can’t figure out what’s the problem.
Start up memory used by Ubuntu is lot more than Hardy (atleast 40-50 MB more)
aliencam
In order to reset the youtube videos without closing firefox completely, you just need to open a terminal and killall npviewer.bin, then reload the page and it should work fine. No need to restart all of firefox.
In order to fix pulseaudio I have been restarting X. Glad to learn that I don’t have to do that now.
I have not had the same firefox issue, and I have not noticed the other issues, but I do not use an external monitor, skype, or a bluetooth mouse.
fujikofujio
Pulseaudio has got to be the most annoying thing they’ve ever added on linux, there must be some great purpose for this but for now I truly despise it!!!
xbmc trouble when using PA.
Garito
Hi!
Another problem: the top bar don’t save the desklets position and order (the
same if you install screenlets)
See you
apass
I couldn’t get my new tv card to work properly with neither hardy or intrepid … guess I’ve to wait for the next release and hopefully driver support for avermedia tv card will be better then.
Steve
Using the latest build of firefox 3.1 cured my hanging firefox and solved a variety of Flash issues.
Anonymous
Some issues I have are the internet connection resets a few times in a row a then is fine for a while. I thought maybe it was an issue with my provider but my laptop does not have this issue (its on 8.04.1). Another issue I had was changing the resolution in a non sudo account. When I did this it caused the screen to ‘roll’ like the old tv’s did with the v-hold issues. I had to hit CTRL + ALT + Backspace then log back in to make it stop. Other than that I like it. Especially the usb install feature.
ramy
i can only attest to the skype problem. i was very worried about it.
dflock
I’ve been getting occasional tiny, scrunched up ‘Save as…’ dialogue boxes - so tiny that you can’t see all the controls and you have to resize them. Some times this happens every save, sometimes not. I haven’t seen this prior to Intrepid.
Anonymous
I’ve had the Flash video issue, the Firefox closing issue and also the audio in issue. No solutions as yet but I’m hoping you find some!
JorgeGomez
You can no longer preview fonts or font folders, since the Font Viewer and thumbnailer dissapeared, with no replacement. LP bug #269920 and Gnome bug #555215 relate the pitiful finger-pointing and hand-washing that ensued.
Anonymous
Unfortunately, this the buggiest version of Ubuntu since I started using it
(from 7.04)
Two more problems:
1. Network Manager? No way! I had to completely uninstall it
2. Encryption is not working for me. No. Not at all.
Anon
Your problems are probably to do with pulseaudio.
If you ever suspend your computer, when you resume it, pulseaudio currently gets stuck (fix on the way into intrepid-proposed) https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pulseaudio/+bug/202089
For now, instead of killing pulseaudio, run:
pasuspender /bin/true
whenever you have pulse problems, to jolt it back to life
This should fix “pulseaudio issues” and “flash issues” as the problem with flash seems to be that it fills up some audio buffer and waits until that has actually been played out of the speakers.
i have also found that you cant use pulse as the input device on skype. but setting the alsa source does work. (as pulse much less rarely is hogging the input device than the output device)
mpoullet
Hi,
I’ve exactly the same issue here with PulseAudio. This has been the most annoying problem for me after upgrading from Hardy(8.04) where all my audio perfectly worked.
Regards,
mpoullet.
manish
Here’s my list
1. Ubuntu 8.10 is just too ‘HEAVY’.
I have 512MB RAM and all previous versions of Ubuntu ran pretty well on it, but 8.10 makes it crawl!
(Ya, I know I can use LXDE or XFCE but I love GNOME too much)
2. The audio doesn’t switch between the speaker and headphone, when I plug in/out my headphones. This is pretty irritating.
3. Firefox hangs after closing (ditto)
Apart from these, 8.10 is the first edition that supports Desktop Effects on my graphic card.
DULESERBIA
I’ve been having problems only with playing videos, they start nicely, but when
i fastforward it video stops, and resumes only when i do ff again but only on
secund or two..
Others of that this ubuntu recognized all my hardware on my laptop, which no
linux distro did..
LOL
The Copywriter Underground
I’ve experienced the “two-second” video stoppage, and also the Firefox “false-close.”
In addition, I’ve started experiencing 2-3 second system freezes in Firefox, where I can’t click or do anything until the PC decides to let me. These haven’t been accompanied by crashes - and the problem could well be in Firefox - but it’s not edifying.
Finally, on my older desktop machine (2MB of RAM), playing music (e.g. - through Rhythmbox) stops for a couple seconds and then resumes, which is damned annoying when I’m singing along - in the silence, I’m forced to confront my lamentably off-key performance.
Overall, I’m happy with 8.10 - except for those annoying freezes.
I’m also wondering when Open Office 3.0 is going to appear in the repository.
acoustyk
Having to switch between virtual desktops after adjusting the brightness on my laptop display. It makes it so that no clicking or anything works and I have to do ctrl-alt-f6 then switch back (same with f7) for it to work properly again.
alamir
I’ve been upgrading since Gutsy, so I feel like I’ve received different types of problems. Some are due to upgrades and some may be due to Gutsy possibly not upgrading as it should:
1)My brightness and some FN keys still doesn’t work.. I may do a clean install with Jaunty to make sure it’s not because I just upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy to Ibex
2)Internal SD Card slot doesn’t work…the only driver I’ve found is one that supposedly works with XP only.
3) Boot takes about 1:00 minute.
4) On the software side, the “widgets” sometimes forget their presets.
5) Upgrades can ruin other software. For example, games like OpenArena and SuperTux stopped working well after I upgraded to Ibex for some reason.
6) Firefox and Opera had java issues. Which was extremely weird. But I had to
spend a good 2 days trying to isolate the problem, it still wasnt working after
completely installing Firefox and Java. ..It turned out that after the upgrade I
had different softwares calling Java and causing firefox and opera to crash.
…and that hanging problem happens in Opera for me. Not really firefox since
I’ve completely re-installed it.
AlrogerJr
Yep… pulseaudio, flash and firefox are bugging me… specially on my old AMD
(single core) desktop.
Pulseaudio seems to lag the whole system… flash videos, SecondLife, VLC…
when desperate I just kill pulseaudio and use the good old ALSA.
For the first time in a Linux upgrade I actually… almost regretted it.
AlrogerJr
Another thing that really bothers in Intrepid is the keyring.
I do not want a keyring if it’s not going to help me with my passwords! The
keyring asks me for a password more often than the rest of the system would
without using it! I don’t care how the password is stored, I just don’t want to
be asked for it! I’m at home!
Any tips on how to get rid of it?
I’ve read a lot about it, but nothing that actually helps and it seems that
GNOME is just not going to work without it!
James
I’ve been having the same symptoms with firefox on 8.04. I had figured it was an issue with one of my plugins, but perhaps it is a more general issue with firefox 3?
Mohan
For me 8.10 has been great, still have issues with waking up from hibernate (if I have too many apps), other than that it’s been really good to me. I run it on HP dv5000z, and custom built desktop, and I run Xubuntu 8.10 on my Asus EeeBox with Boxee on it. :)
Robert
I like most everything about Ubuntu but it’s color scheme. One of the first things I do is change the theme for the boot, usplash, and login screens. There is a problem changing the usplash screen in 8.10. If you try to replace the default usplash screen, then all you get is text instead of a different uslpash screen.
In the Synaptic Manager I would like to have a button that would the search field.
Matti
I fixed the problem with Skype and also some other audio problems by removing pulseaudio and installing esound. See: http://www.econowics.com/news-from-the-net/170/skype-problem-with-audio-playback-ubuntu-810-intrepid-ibex/.
Some other problems:
- Cannot connect to all the wlans Hardy was able to
- When using multiple monitor or a data projector, I have to manually enable
the secondary monitor
- Totem crashes the whole system sometimes when playing a movie file or a web
video stream
Great blog Tom, and I hope we get an updated list of all the problems and solutions to them.
scroobious
For people with pulseaudio problems:
If you use ALSA and pulse is getting in your way, I’ve written instructions on how to rip out pulseaudio and compile the latest ALSA, with surround sound if you have it. The only caveat is that you’ll need to re-compile on kernel upgrades. Personally, it’s solved all kinds of problems for me.
Removing pulse: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6201586&postcount=170
Compiling the latest ALSA: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=6041731&postcount=146
Rob
The “hanging” issue is related to Firefox having been closed improperly. If you go into .mozilla->firefox->*.defaults you should see one or two files named “lock” or have lock in their name. With Firefox closed, delete those files and you’re good to go.
Bill M.
I’ve been experiencing an annoying situation since upgrading to 8.10 from 8.04
on a Dell Inspiron 5150 laptop – my wireless connection automatically starts
and connects WPA to my wireless router AND my wired connection appears to be
also ready. I want to only use the wired connection when I have the cable
plugged in to the Ethernet port. I have to DISABLE the existing wireless
connection and then use a console with “sudo” to restart networking before I can
actually use the wired connection.
Wireless connection locations/settings are remembered which is great, but if I
have my Ethernet cable plugged in, I want that to have priority over wireless.
A whole bunch of Nvidia and Xorg updates have done a lot to fix video useability
with low-end compiz. Console and application windows data areas are no longer
are painted black when compiz effects are enabled.
I used to be a total KDE slut when I ran SuSE (8.2, 9.3, 10.0) and never much
cared for earlier Gnome. Now, that’s all I mostly use – I hardly ever run KDE 4
and mostly switch out of Gnome as default to run XFCE. I’m enjoying the desktop
effects of XFCE more and more and many of the Gnome features incorporated.
Thanks, Ubuntu team for a great product and for working so hard on fixing the
twitchy little things!
-*-Bill
Amarok also seems to have been tweaked quite a bit – system no longer goes
completely sluggish while using Amarok in Gnome
Pip
Oh yeah.. 1st I can not connect to WPA wireless network. It keeps saying wrong password. 2nd, PC internal loudspeaker is unmuted when I plugin head phone.!!!!!
beerfan
Hardy Heron was the worst Ubuntu release in recent history. Pulseaudio was the primary contributor, for myself. OSS4 actually worked much better for me but desktop integration was a nightmare. That and other issues finally drove me to downgrade to Windows and by the sounds of it Intrepid is no better. And yes, audio is that important.
Are you listening Canonical?
Donncha O Caoimh
I think I can claim the weirdest bug. In the spreadsheet in Open Office, moving
the cursor would repeat the last “action”. If I deleted a cell with backspace,
every cell I moved the cursor over would delete.
If I typed “hello world” into a cell, that same string would appear as I moved
the cursor about. Bizarre.
I also had the pulse audio bug, sound in Firefox and writing/mounting DVDs.
The killer bug for me was my Xbox 360 joypad not working. It worked briefly but then the next day it was broken again.
I even blogged about it I got so annoyed at Ubuntu. I have managed to fix all the problems except the joypad. That’s really annoying me. :(
eltiorob
VLC runs painfully slow on my (old-ish) AMD desktop. Prior to this version I used VLC as my media player of choice, but I’ve had to move back to Movie Player (with the mPlayer backend) to view videos, as VLC just wouldn’t be able to play any videos at anything approaching a bearable frame rate. I’m sure it’s got to do with defaults (rendering engine, post-processing, codecs?) but I haven’t been able to tinker my way out of this :(
qpease
I am a relative newbie to Linux. I first used and loved PCLinuxOS 2007 and still think it rocks. There were a few things that I could not get to work with it that seemed, well flawless in Ubuntu. So, I made the switch on my laptop and was pleased. This was Ubuntu 8.04. I anxiously awaited the final release of 8.10 and had the thing installed right away, but was disappointed with all the things I lost….WOW, what a piece of work they did with this one. My computer is a Dell Inspiron 6400 that ran great on 8.04 and took a dump with 8.10. Now, two months later and much work on my part I have lost bluetooth funtionality, my wifi drops from time to time, Skype is nearly worthless with delayed chat and no sound. What good is an upgade when I am forced to make a downgrade.
anon
My wireless. Same computer, same wireless since freakin’ Warty Warthog, worked without any issues. 8.10 installed, and suddenly the system has no clue that there’s a wireless there *headdesk*
I will shoot someone if I actually have to install ndiswrapper. This is crazy.
Thx for the pulseaudio tip. Deleted, BUHBYE. Ooh, faster….
(Have the insane slow FF, the two second kill on flash, the mysterious 2-30 secon overall freezes, and oh did I mention insanely slow, besides grinding my entire system to a crawl while it’s running?
Oy.
James
I couldn’t re-enable Compiz after using two screens without desktop effects, and the problem was the Virtual resolution line. Thanks for your help :-)
Scott
As a data point, I have exactly the same problem (one core stuck at 100% and no exit) on XP and Vista machines (FF 3.0.x).
zesty109
A new Ubuntu 8.10 user,
Absolutely none of the media players work for me. They all will open up without trying to play something on them, but the second I try to open a movie file or a dvd, they crash. Every time. I have no clue what is wrong.
Anonymous
8.10 Chokes on wireless. It seems to be a problem with wpa. Iv’e read a dozen articles on it with no clear solution. It won’t take the correct password.
Anonymous
no sound on mine just crackleing sounds
and if you have desktop cube and cube gears enables, and your background isnt
totally opaque the screensaver is jumpy
Jinty
http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#ALSAApplications
If you set up up to only use pulseaudio you will not have probs with sound or
quitting firefox!
I now can have 4 different audio apps playing 4 different files at the same
time.
I am a linux novice, but as I understand it there are the esd, alsa and
pulseaudio sound servers. Some applications use esd (including the default gnome
start up sound - which hogs the soundcard preventing any pulseaudio apps from
giving sound)
You need to follow the above guide to allow esd and alsa apps to use pulseaudio
plugins.
Before this fix (or series of fixes) firefox and songbird would not close
properly and too much memory and cpu were being used.
Everything is fine now, except that for some strange reason I don’t seem to be
able to define my own startup sounds.
If I can fix this so can you!!
ivainsencher
thanks for the tip on compiz after using external monitor. it worked fine.
Limburger
My Brother HL-2030 printer does not work out-of-the-box. It does in Madriva,
Fedora and elive (apparently).
If Linux wants to be an alternative to Windows, it should all work out of the
box. Period.
Chaanakya
I had tons of problems with sound and bluetooth. My God bluetooth! Why the heck did they rush in with the BlueZ 4.0 stack? Half of the dongles didn’t work (that had worked before in Hardy), and even the ones that worked didn’t manage to work properly. My sound effects, which were perfectly fine in Hardy, broke completely in Intrepid, leaving me only with the login sound. All in all, Intrepid was a step backward. I hope they get their act together with Jaunty! By the way, I did upgrade to Hardy … it felt *REALLY* good!
thewebpromoter
I cannot enable my Canon Pixma 198 Multi Printer in Ubuntu 8.10
UbuntuFan
I have found the following problems:
The Guest session will not switch back to the original login. I just get a black screen and have to hard boot the machine.
My bluetooth headphone will not work with ALSA. I have to use OSS. Also the control buttons like pause/next/previous on the headphone no longer work.
When dragging a card in Freecell it crashes Xorg. I have to reboot.
These are just the ones I can remember right now.
Eric
I just found your site, and was reading through the articles when this one caught my eye.
My biggest complaint/bug is that I can’t mount my camera. It’s been able to mount in all previous flavours of Ubuntu, but this one…
There’s a bug report, but so far, no one’s done a thing about it:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/285682
They suggested a workaround of using a card reader, but this is an older camera that uses smartmedia cards (remember those, anyone). It’s a great camera, and I use it on a regular basis, but I can’t get the photos off of it. Tried stopping gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor, but I still get errors…
MadHat
-Network-Manager and the applet are still very dodgy.
-Spent 9 hours trying to repair network-manager that was reporting wireless to be working but not detecting any AP’s, read just about every write-up on the net, ended up having to re-install ubuntu all together!
-It seems a LOT of people are still having this problem, especially with broadcom or intel chipsets.
selim
I have a problem when i start firefox: it is displayed on top of everything(on the upper-most layer). If you switch firefox to fullscreen and back to normal size, it will end up as it should be, but doing this every time i start firefox is quickly becoming annoying.
Anonymous
3 different machines, all completely different hw:
Can’t use my nvidia cards for 3d, plus they tend to crash the machine (never
used to, over ten years of nvidia on Linux and I’ve never had problems b4), lost
bluetooth on my laptop, there is a constant “dd” process that scans my disks
every few seconds, (wear out the disks after a while) get lots of disk hanging
processes have to reboot (MY GOD, bash can crash my machines!), wireless worked
well till I did an upgrade and then spent 2 months trying to figure out, modules
that can’t be removed (disk sleeping errors), no wake up from suspend on my
laptop, sleep to disk doesn’t work, log out of Intrepid’s version of KDE and
have to reboot, black screens, white screens…In fact I’m writing this because
I just had to reboot while compiling e17 (bash crashed my machine!) , talking
of which, they’ve got e16 (like 9 years old) and no native repos for e17! WTF?
had a friend almost completely converted to Linux after 4 months on Hardy, he
dist-upgraded to Intrepid and two weeks later is back on windows and wants to
“get rid of that kubuntu thing” that “doesn’t work anymore”, have had to
recompile all audio stuff from scratch, man, these guys have it all backwards
now - they update the back-ends to the newest stuff, but leave the programs
old! What’s the point of “supporting more hardware” if that breaks the
front-end stuff (which means you can’t USE the hardware!) - moving off kubuntu
as soon as I find a good .deb-based replacement with kde4…lost this
user…just spent 2 full days trying to reinstall on my laptop after upgrading
pkgs (knew I shouldn’t) and every time it’s something different…how sad,
feisty was sooo good at the time!
Anonymous
I have been using ubuntu for 2 weeks having a dual booting XP and ubuntu 8.10. I
am not able to use my terminal i get this message: “ There was a problem with
the command for this terminal: Text was empty (or contained only whitespace)”
and i tried to find an answer but most of the people do not explain much how to
fix it and i am going to try to use win XP more also my screen flashes sometimes
in mozila or even other programs but not all the time but do not have any issues
in XP like it i would really would like to learn more about linux but it is not
very user friendly i think since i do not know it very well of course. Also i
would like to be able to switch between XP and unbuntu 8.10
without using virtual box since i have the impression that i can not use it as
well it will be like having 2 OS that can not use any of them at the full extent
there in also innent or something using the 2 OS and from what i understood one
can be a guest or something so i can switch between the 2 OS. i will stop here
and see if anyone can help me i would really appreciate it
Thank you
David of California
*sigh*
Just stumbled upon your blog here while I was Googling away, looking for answers
to my many problems with Ubuntu 8.10
This is the first time I have ever tried Linux. My Windows succumbed to a trojan recently, which laid waste to my old Dell desktop you see, and believing the hype, I said goodbye to Gates(perhaps prematurely?) and installed Ubuntu 8.10.
I have experienced NOTHING but problems. First off, after the install, I was met with a blank tan screen on my monitor after login. I solved that, after many hours spent sitting at a public computer in a library, searching the Ubuntu forums for an answer. (I ended up having to remove compiz)
Then there was my modem problem. (Yes, I’m still that guy on dialup!) More research, over many days, got that working.
Now, this week, I wanted to record some music, original stuff that I’ve been messing around with. With Windows, I always just used Audacity. It worked fine for me, and I didn’t feel the need for anything fancier. Always got the job done without any hiccups.
Well, I downloaded the Linux version of Audacity the other day, and it is totally useless in Ubuntu 8.10! More Google searches show me I am not alone in this.
Oh, and trying to read my email in Yahoo apparently crashes my Firefox browser. Discovered I am not alone in this either!
Now, before I try to attempt ANYTHING in Ubuntu, I do an online search for known problems with it. And you know what? Everything I want to try, I see pages and pages of people complaining, and asking why this or that doesn’t work, how do I fix it? And so forth.
I have not been afraid to get my hands dirty, and do my research and use the terminal to fix things. And this is coming from someone who just a few months ago, barely knew much beyond how to power on a computer! I am not in anyway, shape or form a computer expert,(though Ubuntu is quickly forcing me to become one) and my patience is wearing thin.
I realize Ubuntu is a ‘free’ operating system. I am very grateful that it has enabled me to get back online and continue to run my small business. But I am sick to death already of fighting with it everytime I want to do something really simple that should JUST work.
So: Ubuntu 8.10 - great to tinker around with, but not ready for prime time, or your average Joe Public, computer user. IMHO.
Knut
Something happend to the keyboard in 8.10. It seems to be a shorter delay before a key is repeated
Ubukool
I love 8.10 and I’m not complaining, but I’ve had a few sound problems. After waking up from suspend, sound won’t work. There is a workaround which is to ctrl-alt-F6 and if the desktop doesn’t come back, ctrl-alt-F7. That gets things back to normal but it’s a niggle. It used to work fine on Gutsy. I noticed it first on Hardy - I couldn’t use that release because of the sound problems and had to revert to Gutsy! Intrepid is much better. Maybe it’s a pulseaudio problem?