Jeffrey Carlyle
2009-08-18T20:00:06-05:00

Ubuntu Is Decidedly Uncool

Posted: 18-Aug-2009 8:00PM CDT
Topics: [JeffCenter]

So I bought into the hype and decided to try out the professional Debian-based Linux distribution Ubuntu. You'd think that since someone presumably pays Canonical to create releases of their platform there would be at least some basic quality control in their release procedure, even something as simple as making sure all of the source packages in the distribution actually build; however, this does not appear to be the case.

There is a pretty simple bug in the vnc4server package when running on 64-bit systems. This bug was first reported to Canonical almost two years ago, and the fix has been known for sometime: it is as simple as moving an include outside of extern "C". Despite having a known fix this bug remains unclosed.

So fine, I know what the fix, and vnc4server is open source, so I think I'll just fix it myself. But no, the vnc4 source code included in Canonical's Jaunty release cannot be built from source. The package has dependencies on packages that are not even available in the Jaunty release, and once I worked around, I found that the xserver code included in the package is so old that it can't be built on Jaunty either. I've now wasted hours dealing with this: all so I can cut-and-paste between my vnc windows and my Windows box.

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