Common problems with Ubuntu

[geoffrey mendelson]

On May 11, 2010, at 12:42 PM, Orna Agmon Ben-Yehuda wrote:
>
> Another problem I have been experiencing for the past 3 major Ubuntu  
> distributions (8.*, 9.*, 10.04, 64 bit OS on a 64 bit dual core) is  
> that the X becomes extremely slow after a major operation (such as  
> running heavy-memory Matlab scripts, or even an ad with sound on  
> walla's weather page). It gives me the feeling that even once the  
> application is long gone, the memory is still not really freed.


While you are at it, my favorite UBUNTU bug. It was first discovered  
around release 6. A workaround was found, but it no longer works.

At some time in the recent past the keyboard interface under X  
changed. The version of X provided with UBUNTU did not accomodate the  
change (for some reason it only shows up in UBUNTU) , while Apple did.  
So if you enable remote connections via XDMCP on an UBUNTU system, and  
connect using
MacOS's X server the keyboard is broken under Gnome.

Gnome is the prefered (as in prefered by the development team, meaning  
it gets the most support, features, effort, etc) desktop for UBUNTU.

The workaround worked under MacOS 10.4 (Tiger) but has since stopped  
working under 10.5 (Leopard) or 10.6 (Snow Leopard). It is definately  
an UBUNTU bug and has been documented as so in their bug tracking  
system.

The only working way of accessing the system and still use gnome is to  
use VNC, which has it's own problems.

While this does not sound like a big issue, since MacOS X is UNIX, it  
very nicely connects via SSH and supports X forwarding, which makes  
remote use simple. Except that gnome does not work. :-(

Geoff.


-- 
geoffrey mendelson N3OWJ/4X1GM
Jerusalem Israel geoffreymendelson at gmail.com
New word I coined 12/13/09, "Sub-Wikipedia" adj, describing knowledge  
or understanding, as in he has a sub-wikipedia understanding of the  
situation. i.e possessing less facts or information than can be found  
in the Wikipedia.