Stubborn Intel Graphics Bug Haunts Ubuntu 12.04 320
jones_supa writes "The current long-term support version of Ubuntu (12.04) has been experiencing a remarkably tough-to-crack and widely affecting bug related to laptops using an Intel graphics solution. When the lid is closed, every now and then the desktop freezes and only the mouse cursor can be moved. Compiz is usually found hung in the process, switching to a VT afterwards works. The Freedesktop guys are also informed. Have Slashdotters been bitten by this bug and possibly could offer some detective work to help the OSS community find and apply the correct fix?"
Re:Irony (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to defend the "Works For Me"-closing. It is *very* hard to track bugs which are not showing up on your machine (or any test machine). You never know exactly what that user has already done to the machine prior to the bug occurring and it's hard to get additional information. While it for sure sucks if you get that response, the immediate reaction should be "well, how can I help you find this" and not "I still have that problem" as it happens many times. Also many bug reports which are closed with "works for me" never received any attention from the reporter after reported.
Re:What they are actually reporting an Issue. (Score:4, Interesting)
Tho I prefer E17 to compiz I have CCM running on a toshiba that had this problem. The only fix (for me) that i found is to enable screen-locking.
It brings up the login dialog and restores the desktop
A wider scale problem (Score:2, Interesting)
My view is that this is only an individual symptom of a larger scale problem. It seems that there are a lot of old, verified, almost showstopper bugs that just get ignored. I'm too busy/lazy to hunt the links at this point, but for example GNOME3 has probably from the beginning had a bug that it gets very sluggish after a few days, at least on some GPU's/drivers, the kernel's trashing behavior in out-of-memory situations is horrible, the audio stack is a horrible mess etc.
It's probably a wider problem of QA, that may be very difficult to solve. At least as a programmer I'm first to admit that I don't want to use my spare time fixing bugs. Debian's almost draconian policies seem to do quite well in terms of stability, but the desktop often lags behind (this may be unavoidable) and the desktop doesn't seem to be a very high priority for them.
PS. This post in no way suggests that things are better, or aren't a lot worse, in Windows-world and OS X with the controlled hardware platform is a very different situation. Maybe I should check if the grass is really greener in the BSD-side.
Re:What they are actually reporting an Issue. (Score:3, Interesting)
I have been reporting that problem for a while, but they just assume that I am an idiot who just doesn't know how to use a computer.
I'm guessing that, in their eyes, you didn't ask your question in the proper form [catb.org].
(I don't necessarily agree with all of ESR's points myself, but his essay is kind of like a creed that the OSS Folks That Matter religiously follow -- so, like it or not, you have to follow it too.)
Re:sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a while ago, but offhand there were a couple of panel additions that I consider mandatory that I couldn't find - most importantly hierarchical menu-based file browsing. It actually sounded like one of the base XFCE modules probably provided what I wanted, but didn't appear to be included in Xubuntu or any of the available add-on packages, and I couldn't be bothered with finding a compatible source version and getting it to compile correctly just to see if it actually was suitable. Perhaps the problem was simply that I'm still running 10.04 because I'm unwilling to deal with Unity's idiot-friendly interface. I had actually been testing out the xubuntu desktop for a few days to see if it was minimally acceptable before upgrading to 12.x, sadly it didn't quite pass muster.
I think another problem was a limitation to a single-level heirarchy on the program menu - I've got a couple categories that contain several hundred infrequently entries, without subcategories I'm stuck with either a ridiculously long scrolling menu, or cluttering up the top-level menu with several extra categories that I have to manage by hand.
I tried KDE as well - I believe my problem there was that the screen corners are "numb", all panel buttons start one pixel away where they require attention to click, and the nuisance factor is too great to put up with on things I click dozens of times a day. I'll put up with that sort of idiocy on Windows because there's compatibility gains to be had, but not on a Linux desktop manager.