Dugg!

On Tuesday I applied the automatic upgrade that Ubuntu told me was waiting to be installed. 15 minutes later my machine locked up. On  a reboot it just hung. This was not looking good! So I booted to the recovery prompt, got my old Windows 2000 box working, and went looking for a solution.

Within 15 minutes I had found a thread about the problem on the Ubuntu forums, and in another 3 minutes my Ubuntu machine was back to normal. I then went back to the Ubuntu forms, posted my error log, and asked that they pull the upgrade. Realising that there was a good chance others would be affected, and that the good folk of Canonical might be asleep (New Zealand is a little out of the mainstream) I put a message on Digg^* to publicise the problem. I believe the message might even have made it the front page for a few brief moments.

Within the day another fix was produced and we all moved on.

I think the whole process shows the strengths of both the open source model and the modular nature of Linux. The ability to easily roll back the faulty fix, the community involvement in alerting others to the problem, the speed in creating the resultant fix of the fix - I think that they are all testament to a very efficient and open process.

I am perhaps a little coloured by one Windows automatic upgrade that resulted in me having to reinstall the whole Windows operating system from scratch. Now that was a very painful experience...

^*Yes, I meant "wary", not "weary". I realised the mistake the minute I posted the message. Oops.

11:10:03 AM