Karmic Issues That I've Faced

Image by irene gr via Flickr

Everyone has their share of Karmic Koala stories (well, not everyone, but most people). Since I had four home machines on different distributions and versions, and since I had moved to Thailand where bandwidth is somewhat limited, I decided to standardize on Ubuntu 9.10 x86 and use an apt cache to help ease the bandwidth burden for mirrors and the country.

My re-installations weren't without problems. Here are the ones I personally ran into. No hearsay here ... say. Ahem.

• Flashing text and no X after installation, but only on one of the four. All four have i945 chips.
• Samba (and network in general) discovery isn't working correctly.
• Avahi doesn't work due to .local domain on the ISP's part, and disabling the check is no longer an option in /etc/default/avahi-daemon (which doesn't exist now). It's possible, but it's hard-coded into the start-up script, meaning that any updates will kill my change. 
• One machine that tracked the beta had a completely broken GStreamer until re-installation.
• Amazingly long Firefox freezes. I'm talking about over a minute. I've tried turned off safe browsing but that didn't change the behavior.
• Brasero problems (of course!). Known bugs for eight months or so regarding DVD writes.
  
• Totem YouTube plug-in gives DBus errors.
• Totem Video Disk plug-in doesn't work since it uses Brasero.

None of these are show-stoppers for me, but they are certainly annoyances. One of these is hardware related. The others are just half-sharpened pencils.

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