Lucid Lynx: Many Small Breakages

After a couple of days playing again with Lucid, I discovered auto-mounting removable media is broken. It takes two or three tries just for a simple USB memory stick. Music CDs are not properly handled by any of a number of different players: Rhythm Box, Mplayer, and Xine, to name three. Even with all the restricted additions and Medibuntu, things aren’t working properly. I could not copy a DVD without losing the video, for example. Just playing a video DVD was an experience, because dvd-css kept barfing.

Chrome no longer rendered some sites properly after the upgrade to Lucid. I think the Cream/Vim combination has been broken on Debian for years, so Ubuntu has never had one which behaved properly, including this time. Things which worked under 9.10 don’t any more. I am asking my computer ministry clients to stay with Jaunty for now.

Meanwhile, I’m going to continue testing RHEL 6.0-Beta a little more. While there is some risk with things like PySol, it’s easy enough to avoid it for now. Should something else cause a similar X-server crash, I may try to find a way to discuss it with the developers.

Long delayed update — 15JUN10: The breakages have been fixed, apparently, so go for the gusto. I’m using Lynx now as my daily desktop. The issue with RHEL 6 crashing is, near as I can tell, an issue between the drivers (including experimental gl for ATI) and the still crappy accelerated desktop effects eye-candy, along with automated modesetting in the kernel.

Thunderbird: Another Good Idea Trashed

Decided to test drive Thunderbird on my Lucid Lynx system. Big, big mistake.

Upon trying to configure my first account, the application grabbed my details and aggressively ran off with an automatic configuration. But it got things wrong. When I tried to stop it and get things set right, it rewrote things the way it wanted. After the third try, I gave up. I can’t say who for sure put this functionality in, but it broke the thing badly.

Telling me I absolutely must use IMAP just because the server offers it is inexcusable arrogance. I know what I want, and why I want it, and I don’t appreciate some doofus deciding for me based on some common expectation. Yes, I suppose I could have manually changed the prefs.js myself, but that should not be necessary. If I have to fight for what I want, it’s no longer worth it.

Thunderbird is now officially trash in my book.