Not so Feisty?

[robinturner]

Hmm, I'm beginning to wonder if I was premature with my praise of the latest Ubuntu. Feisty Fawn does not play nice with Firefox, so if any of you are considering installing/upgrading, I'd wait a few weeks until they iron out those bugs.
I've looked through bug reports that say "Firefox crashes when I do X" and they boil down to "Firefox crashes randomly." In fact it looks like any Gecko-based browser will crash randomly, since Epiphany shows the same behaviour, but Opera and Konqueror so far have not. Disabling the DOM inspector seems to reduce the frequency of crashes, but that could be just my impression - as I said, the crashes seem to be random. It doesn't matter whether I'm using GNOME or KDE, whether I've installed add-ons, whether Beryl is installed or whether I'm using open- or closed-source video drivers.

This is very, very bad. I know it's impossible to find enough beta-testers to test every application on every combination of hardware, so when some obscure app crashes in a new distro, I don't diss the developers, but Jesus Christ on a pogo-stick ... Firefox? We're talking about the most popular Open Source application here.

Comments

[trochee.livejournal.com]

hmmm.

I haven't had this problem at all, and I've been using Feisty for ten days or so.

[solri.livejournal.com]

What are your system specs?

[trochee.livejournal.com]

Dell Dimension 4100 with 384MB RAM. I use Gnome.

I'm keeping up with updates in general. I use NoScript in Firefox; is it possible that this protects me?

[solri.livejournal.com]

Nope, it crashes with any extension or no extensions.

[philipispdr.livejournal.com]

Hmm, haven't upgraded to Feisty yet, but maybe I'll leave off for a bit...

[solri.livejournal.com]

I upgraded from Edgy on my computer at work with no problems, so you may be OK. At home, I'm going to stick to openSUSE 10.2 for the time being. Novell may be in league with the Great Satan, but they can kick out a good solid distro.

As of yesterday...

[philipispdr.livejournal.com]

... it's no longer true I haven't upgraded. On a whim I partitioned my laptop and made it dual-boot XP Home and Feisty. So far, no (significant) problems at all¹!


¹"Insignificant" problems included X refusing to load up without special drivers being downloaded via apt-get and the wireless card refusing to auto-detect - so it wasn't quite the painless newbie install I would dream of, but 'twasn't bad.

Sam problem

[(Anonymous)]

I have the same problem, it sounds like. It's horribly annoying. I had the same problem with Edgy (I just recently bought the hardware I'm using). I have an NVidia 7600GT. My system just locks up, seemingly more frequently when I'm using Firefox (like by refreshing the page a few times), but I can get bad behavior from just rapidly switching between desktops in Gnome. I'm very suspicious of the video drivers NVidia shot out of its behind for linux. Either that, or Ubuntu/Linux kernel hackers seriously screwed something up. I have tested this with a 64bit version of WinXP and everything ran fine. I have yet to test this with another Linux distribution. I may go back to using the nv open source drivers and see if in my case this can be averted. Also, what is with JMicron support in Ubuntu (this doesn't appear to be a kernel thing). I have to pass GRUB the irqpoll flag to even install or boot to my SATA hard drive.

Re: Sam problem

[solri.livejournal.com]

I think the nvidia drivers are OK - no problem with them on my office machine with Kubuntu Edgy or Feisty (GeForce 4). There again, the 64-bit drivers may not be so stable.