There is a corresponding bug report in Launchpad that has been confirmed but unresolved since May 2011.

Here’s what Apple does well in my mind: Apple does a good job of providing a solution that works out of the box for a limited environment and a very limited supported set of hardware. They invest considerable resources in that and it works quite well, most of the time, for most people, especially non-tech ones that don’t turn screws. It even works well for many tech users (e.g., myself). I personally consider it the best compromise for my productivity. And that is even though I miss the freedom I had during my decade of using Linux as the main OS, and I am annoyed by how they close they platform and much of the corporate behavior they are exhibiting.

Ubuntu desperately tries to emulate that user experience, with way too few resources and for a completely undefined hardware landscape. They fail miserably.

Two developers at tt gave up on 11.04 this summer and switched over to Windows 7 as their desktop OS because of recurring issues with Eclipse crashing, menu bars vanishing, X hanging (yes, we give everyone their OS of choice and let them administer their own desktops). Two different sets of hardware, two different people. For UNIX only stuff, they now work via VNC on my workstation which is still 8.04 because I am a conservative bastard . From my experience, and much of what I have heard, 11.04 is simply more broken than 10.04 and that was more broken than 8.04 (and arguably, that was more broken than 6.06).

My claim is that Ubuntu should stop trying to emulate what Apple is doing, because they cannot possibly do so successfully, given the resources they have and the hardware landscape they have to support. And they should stop making these lonesome, ill-communicated, ill-documented decisions, like, using an untested event framework to reduce boot times so they look good in quick first-glance reviews. Or switching from gnome standards to an unready custom shell that was designed for *Netbooks* of all things. These decisions alienate both their power users and the external OSS developer community.

They should return to embracing the open source community and try to build a working desktop out of community supported OSS components for power users that know what they are doing. We don’t need shiny demos. We need a working system.

Let Apple cater to non-tech people — let’s be serious, they are never going to use Linux on a general-purpose PC anyway. Most of them will be using iOS / Android type devices as their main platforms before too long, because that is all they need.

For once, obviously for the WebOS staff whose work would not go down the drain with the demise of Palm and the scandalous incompetence of the HP board and their short-term CEO. For technology as a whole, because Web OS is too beautiful a piece of work with too many good individual ideas to just die in silence. For Amazon, because this move may indeed enable them to build a media delivery ecosystem that could seriously rival the censored, ahem, “curated” iOS ecosystem of rising media superpower Apple.

And that would be good news for all of us, I think. As much as I like and admire (love?) the quality and elegance of Apple’s products, I can’t help feeling uneasy at the concentration of power over media delivery they are building. And, yeah, competition, at the end, might just get me an even better iPhone .

        tar  <my_options> 2> >(grep -v 'socket ignored' >&2)

As I found out the hard way yesterday, there is no way you can run a Lucid system with a kernel <= 2.6.32. The reason is that Ubuntu’s replacement for init, upstart, recently revamped for even faster Desktop startup times, specifically its mount_all component, call experimental system calls only introduced with this kernel version. A fact that’s conveniently missing from their release document boasting about Cloud integration features.

Apparently it has not crossed their mind  (or they don’t care) that this excludes Lucid from a whole army of useful server deployment scenarios. For instance, Citrix’ frequently used Virtualization host XENServer comes with a 2.6.18 kernel with backported drivers. Debian’s recent lenny runs 2.6.26,  even Ubuntu’s own hardy, a very stable platform as a XEN Dom0 host, runs 2.6.24. While it is possible to run differing kernels in Dom0 and DomU that’s generally considered a bad idea because of frequent incompatibilities in the past.  There’s loads of other reasons you may need an older kernel to work besides paravirtualization, e.g., specialized hardware drivers.

libudev: udev_monitor_new_from_netlink: error getting socket:  Invalid argument
mountall:mountall.c:2955: Assertion failed in main:  udev_monitor = udev_monitor_new_from_netlink (udev, "udev")

Obviously the design decision by Ubuntu to reduce Desktops boot times by revamping and parallelizing upstart has jeopardized its usability in many server scenarios.

What’s also increasingly annoying about these mishaps is the non-communication by Ubuntu. Only in the launchpad discussion about this specific bug, you’ll find a confirmation by an Ubuntu team member who writes “Sorry, we simply do not support earlier kernel versions. The plumbing layer is now tightly integrated with the kernel..”. This seems like a pretty important decision for a distribution seriously aiming at the server platform. One that should be discussed with the users, and prominently annouced, instead of being hidden away in a Bug discussion.

Maybe administrators will have to come to terms with the observation that Ubuntu is a distribution aimed exclusively at the Desktop , aiming at imitating Apple’s ease-of-use for end users, and increasingly sacrificing its Debian-inherited server friendly roots in turn.