Xubuntu Feisty Herd 5 Test Report
20-03-2007
version 1.0
Jelle de Jong
jelledejong@powercraft

This is my test report for the Herd 5 version of Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty release.

I have done some testing for this release with the following hardware set-up:

Motherboard:
- VIA Epia Mini-ITX EN12000E
Hard disk: 
- Samsung HM080HI - 80 GB - 12ms 8mb 5400rpm - Serial ATA 150 - SpinPoint M80S
Memory:
- Kingston Dimm 1Gb DDR2 PC2-4200 533Mhz
BIOS setting:
- Default optimized settings

I am only going to point out the problems that I encountered while testing. I am not
going to discuss all the good points, because this will take to long. So please
don't put me in a box of being a freaked complainer :-D

1: The dependencies of the Gaim Internet Messenger package are weird. Gaim is
installed standard on Xubuntu and should not depend on GNOME package dependencies.
But when I enter the following command: sudo apt-get install gaim it wants to
install all kinds of GNOME packages.

2: The Time and Date configuration tool (time-admin) is working strange. If you
select a different date or time and press the synchronize button there is no process indicator?. 
This is very confusing, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. 
Also the help button doesn't do anything.

3: The xsrceensaver has 3D rendering themes enabled by default. This is not very
handy. I don't have 3D rendering support installed by default. When manually
compiled and installed 3D rendering will eat up all my cpu power, and power consumption will be higher. 
I also had an AMD Geode with SiS741CX chip for testing. 
This motherboard will even crash when trying to attempt 3D rendering. So the xscreensaver will crash 
that motherboard. Also control + alt + delete will enable the xscreensaver screen
lock function, this works but I think the looks are very ugly. People around me
don't like it either. So the appearance can be improved drastically.

4: When I install DVD playback support I need CSS to decode encrypted DVD's.
Normally there is a script called “install-css.sh”,  that installs some *.deb package files from the internet. 
But this script is nowhere to be found in feisty. I had to download this package manually. 
I am talking about the libdvdcss package and the /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css script.

5: The new thunar volume management system is not fitting to my needs! They said
this feature could be disabled easy. But I can't find a working option to get the
old behavior back. When I plug in a normal USB 2.0 1GB usbstick. Thunar says I have
plugged in a USB 2.0 Music Player. This is absurd and very annoying and confusing.
Make it possible to get the old system back so I can make a usbdisk mount automatic
to /media/usbdisk and when I plug in a usbstick it will mount automatic to
/media/usbstick

6: I wanted to download the daily ISO and burn it to a CD, but the ISO was more than
700MB and it will not fit on a normal CD. This probably is caused by the rsync
system that makes an image bigger when changes are added. The ISO was 712MB, please keep it under 700MB.

7: When pressing control + alt + backspace the gdm-greeter will not be shown again
after the x session is terminated. Checking with the top command it will have 100%
CPU load on the gdm package. I have to do sudo pkill gdm and startx to get x up
again.

8: Please don't use The GIMP as the default image viewer but use GQview instead. I
don't like loading The GIMP by default when I only want to watch a *.jpg image.

9: xfce4mixer will not update/synchronize with ALSA when the combo boxes in the
switches section are changed. You can test this when running alsamixer and
xfce4mixer at the same time and compare their settings.

10: System beeps sounds from openoffice.org are played over the motherboard speaker
and the normal speaker. This happens for example when trying to close an unsaved
document. Please only use the normal sound speakers so that people next to me are not annoyed.

11: I think the two new options in the title bar of windows for sticking and
shading are creating too many options and are confusing for normal users. I know people
that still have trouble with maximizing and minimizing. Also where can these new
window options be enabled or disabled?

12: There is a problem with the task list space system. Every button in the task
list seems to have an almost fixed size. When you have an item in the task list with
only a few letters, there will be a big, empty and ugly space before it. Please only set a
maximum size and let the minimum size of a button be determent by the number of
characters used in the task list label.

13: The visual appearance of the Xubuntu gdm-greeters are not my style, I think 
it's ugly. The boot-up flash screen is a lot better, but I would like more symmetry
in it. (just a comment)

14: The tool that previous was called Add and Remove is now called package manager
and there is also the Synaptic package manager. Those two different programs also
have the same icons. I think this is very confusing.

15: The icons in the list on the left side of the package manager tool (add and
remove) are all the same. So the games, office, internet etcetera have the same
icons. I don't believe this will look very appealing.

16: Shutdown and restart won't work in a normal gdm-greeter started x session. 
Instead it will return to the gdm-greeter screen. it will not power off or reboot.


17: When shutting down by clicking on the shutdown button in gdm-greeter or with the
sudo shutdown -h now command, can both result in a system displaying that the system
is halted. But then the system is still powered on. Pressing the power button will
result in messages of enabling and disabling devices, but it will not shutdown. I
have to reset or hold the power button for more than 5 seconds.

18: Thunar is not updating its current view when files are changed or added in that
directory!

19: When a hard disk is in sleep mode it is not spinning, this is fine. But when I
try to power down the system it will turn on the hard disk. 
Resulting in a disc that is spun  up for one second before the system powers down. 
This is not very healthy for the hard drive.
 The life cycle of the hard drive is partially determent by the number of spin ups.

20: When openoffice.org is installed the links installed in the menu->office section
are wrong. All those links are pointed to the ooffice command but they should be
pointed to the specific application like: oowriter, oomath, ooimpress, oocalc and
oobase.  Now hitting the OpenOffice.org Writer link will not start oowriter but will
start ooffice! This is also the case with the other oo links.

21: There is a font displaying resolution problem in the Ubuntu distributions. 
The commands: xdpyinfo | grep resolution and xrdb -q | grep Xft should give the same resolution (DPI) but they are way off, resulting in blurry fonts in some applications, like in openoffice.org. 
Normally I was able to solve this by calculate and adding a DisplaySize option in the xorg.conf monitor section. 
But that does not work with feisty!

22: When I do a search for the program penrose in the xfc4appfinder and then right
click for more information on the penrose item, it will show a window that has a width that is far to big!. 
The window will be way of the screen.

For the moment these are my bad points. If you need help debugging, or need more
information you can contact me. 
It is possible to solve some of these problems, by changing the settings that are default, but the purpose is to get it right form the start!

I put a lot of time and effort into this, I hope it will be used useful.

Keep up the good work!

Best regards,

Jelle de Jong