| Ubuntu upgrade ugliness |
Aug. 28, 2006
Ubuntu's star shines a little less brightly since a recently released patch knocked out its users' graphical user interface. Affected users saw -- the horror, the horror -- a blue screen of death. While this screen had more useful information than the Microsoft blue screen, it still wasn't useful to confused users.
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS users who installed updates between 17:30 UTC on Monday, Aug. 21 and 10:00 UTC on Tuesday, Aug. 22 were the ones affected by this problem.
A note to users on Ubuntu's web site said "An update to the windowing system in Ubuntu was incorrectly released for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. When applied to Ubuntu 6.06, the patch inadvertently breaks the desktop windowing environment on some systems."
It went on, "When we learned of the problem, the patch was immediately withdrawn. Mirrors have also been disabled to ensure that the faulty patch isn't available from them. We have launched an investigation and formal quality process review to understand exactly how this happened and what corrective actions to take."
While users could reach a command line interface, many new Ubuntu users were still confused as to what to do about the problem.
The solution was to login from the command line. Then, the user must do a:
followed bysudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
In most Debian/Linux distributions, this would be done by logging in as the root user, but Ubuntu discourages the use of root, so the more cumbersome, but also more secure, sudo method must be used instead.
You then hold down Control and Alt, and then press Delete, to reboot the xServer into a functional condition.
The problem with the "bad" patch was that it was an experimental patch, which wasn't ready for release to the general public.
Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, Ubuntu's parent company, apologized to users in his blog. "As a team we made a series of errors, and the result was a desktop that was broken for thousands of users, for several hours."
He went on, "My apologies to those who have been affected, I know that a blue screen of death is the very last thing anybody ever wants to see on Linux desktops and that any downtime caused by mistakes on our part, even measured in minutes, is unacceptable."
Shuttleworth explained, "An incident report is being compiled by the team and we will publish that for our broader community and users as soon as it is complete."
Looking ahead, Shuttleworth said, "In addition to the incident report, we are also putting into production a long-discussed mechanism for widespread testing of non-essential updates (support for new hardware, for example) by users who want advanced access to that code, or those who are part of our more sophisticated user community. We know now that no amount of internal testing will find certain issues, even issues which could have a widespread footprint and obvious failures, and the only way to get certainty on the potential impact of a change is to put it out to a wider, but controlled, audience."
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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