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Lee Hanken
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Episode: 943
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Title: HPR0943: Freedom is not Free 2 - Bugs
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0943/hpr0943.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-08 05:18:03
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---
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Hello, this is Ahuka, and welcome to the second in our series Freedom is not free.
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In the last episode I introduced this idea that I think the software that we work with,
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we sometimes call it free software, we sometimes call it open source software, but I find
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that there are certain problems with both of those, and I suggested that really what
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we ought to do is refer to this as community supported software.
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And that raises then the question of, well, what are the various ways you can support?
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And I mentioned four of them in the last podcast, and I said I wanted to come back and take
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a look at them in somewhat more detail.
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So what I want to do this time is I want to talk about the first of the four topics that
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I had mentioned, ways that you can support free software, even if you are not a programmer.
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All right?
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I mean, if you're a developer, if you're helping to keep the kernel going, you are working
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on some of the software that we all love to use, then God bless you.
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You're already doing enough.
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What I want to do is I want to address all of the people in the free software community
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who use the software, who love the software, who want to support it, and say, hey, I'm
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not a programmer.
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How can I help?
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And that's what this series is all about.
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Now the first of the topics that I want to address is bugs.
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Yeah.
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Okay?
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Well, every piece of software has bugs.
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That's an unavoidable fact of life.
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And Linux software, open source software, that has bugs too.
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So I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.
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But, you know, I happen to think that in many cases, the free and open software is as
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good if not better than the commercial proprietary software, but that doesn't mean it's perfect.
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That doesn't mean it is bug free.
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These things have bugs.
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And when software has bugs, one of the questions then is, well, how are we going to deal with
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that?
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If you take a look at most of the projects that you're interested in, and you go check out
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their website, you're going to see that almost always there is some kind of mechanism that
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is going to deal with bugs.
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Now I'd like to start with the distribution, okay?
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Generally speaking, when you install Linux on a system, you are installing a distribution
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and the whole idea of a distribution is that it is a bundle of software that was put
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together that is designed to work together.
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So it makes sense to start there, all right?
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Now in some cases, you may want to go past the distribution, and I want to talk about
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that, but let's take that as a starting point.
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There's a fellow named George Castro who is a canonical employee and has done a lot
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of work with the various upstream projects.
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That's a big part of his job at canonical, and he happens to have spent a lot of time
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living in the same general area that I do.
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So I've had a number of conversations with him about this.
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When a software distribution puts all these things together, they make certain choices.
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So for instance, Ubuntu might say, well, this is the software we're going to use for
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playing your MP3 files.
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This is the software we're going to use for video.
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This is the software we're going to use for your mail client.
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This is the web browser we're going to install, and so on and so forth.
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Now when they do that, what they're doing is saying, we have tested this software in
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our distribution.
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We think it is the best choice for what we want to do, and they're making essentially
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some kind of claim to providing at least some level of support here.
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The opposite can also be the case.
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Let's say you've got a distribution that says, we're going to use evolution for our
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mail client, and you say, I don't like evolution, I'm going to install Thunderbird.
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You're quite welcome to do it.
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I'm sure all of the major distributions are going to have that in their repositories.
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But if you were to file a bug and say, well, Thunderbird is not, you know, I've got a problem
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with Thunderbird, they might look at it and say, it's not our problem, okay?
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I had something like this happen to me recently.
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I filed a bug with OpenSusa, and the bug had to do with a video editing program called
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Kaden Live.
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Now, I happen to love Kaden Live.
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It was having this certain problem.
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It kept crashing.
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That's considered a serious problem, and I filed a bug with OpenSusa, because I thought
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that was a good place to start, and then I got a response from the people at OpenSusa.
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They closed the bug and said, you know, we don't support this particular software package.
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This is not part of our distribution, therefore we're not taking responsibility.
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That doesn't make the people of OpenSusa evil.
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It's just, you know, you can't deal with everything.
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So they've made a decision about what they will or will not deal with.
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So in a case like that, the only thing you could do that is to file the bug with the Kaden
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Live project, which I did.
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So that's fine, but you might want to start with, generally speaking, the distribution.
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Now every distribution is going to have their own little way of doing things I know with
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Ubuntu.
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They've got this thing called Launchpad, and you go in there, and you can file your bugs
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and all of this, and OpenSusa had a particular forum that you would go in, and you'd file
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bugs there.
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And so, you know, there's different ways of doing it.
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How are you going to find out about that?
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Well as it happens for at least the major ones, there's already a very nice site.
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And it's a place called Linux, called HowToAtLinuxCareer.com, guide to bug submitting and bugtracking
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in Linux.
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I've put the URL in the show notes, and they give you some general instructions for Ubuntu
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for Mint, for Fedora, for Debian, and for OpenSusa.
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So I'm thinking you're kind of hitting the biggies there.
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That's going to work for a lot of people.
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And if you go to this site, you take a look, you know, what's the first thing they say?
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Linux distributions and open source software in general are before anything, community
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efforts.
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All right, that's exactly the theme of this series that I'm doing is to say this is
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community-supported software, all right, then they go every distribution list somewhere
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in its website, ways to contribute and help the effort, okay?
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So submitting bugs is important, and if you go to this site, it's going to tell you.
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So, you know, if you go there, you take a look at Ubuntu, they're going to give you
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a link to LaunchPad and some general instructions about all of that.
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If instead you went to Mint, they give you a slightly different.
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And it's also in LaunchPad, but it is because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu.
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Then for Fedora, there is a site called bugzilla.redhat.com that you would go to there.
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If it was Debian, it's a site called bugs.debian.org, all right?
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And then, of course, OpenSusa, you've got a bugzilla.novel.com, and then they say for
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non-technical users, you might want to try the forums.
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So that's the starting point.
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You take a look at all of these places and you find out, okay, how do I do this?
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Now, the next thing I want to say is that you can submit a bug at any time, but it is
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going to be most useful if you do a little bit of work first.
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Now, when I talk about the work, you got kind of thinking about what's happening.
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All right?
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I had a problem recently that initially I thought it was a software problem.
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I might have filed a bug.
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I just started having crashes on one of my machines, and so I started to think, okay, what's
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happening when it crashes?
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And I started looking at that, I said, gee, every time it crashes, I'm doing something that
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involves video, interesting idea.
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And okay, what did anything change on the system?
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Yes, I put in a video card a few weeks ago.
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That was a new video card.
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Come to think of it, I think all of those crashes happened after I put in the video card.
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So first thing I did a little troubleshooting, I said, change drivers.
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And I tried several different drivers.
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I tried the default drivers from the distro.
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I tried some proprietary drivers from the manufacturer.
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No matter what driver I tried, I kept having the crashes.
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Finally, I just pulled the video card out and ran off of the onboard video, no more crashes.
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I kind of think I found my problem.
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And that's an example of the kind of the troubleshooting that you want to do.
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A good bug report is going to help.
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If you can, identify these things.
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So one of the first things, if you're having a bug, did anything just change?
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Okay, in my case, I put in a new video card.
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Is it, I've had bugs that happen because, for instance, I decided to upgrade the version
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of my distribution.
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I run kabuntu on a number of my boxes.
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And so every six months there's a new version of kabuntu.
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And okay, I upgrade to a new version.
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Now I've got this problem.
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All right, well, that's an indication right away.
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It probably has something to do with that new version of the distro.
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Did I just install some new software?
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That new software might be conflicting with something.
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So you kind of look at what changed as being a clue.
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And then if you can, can you roll back the change?
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All right, if you install the piece of software and it causes a problem, does removing the
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software get rid of the problem?
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You know, if you change the driver for your video card and the problem showed up, can
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you change the driver back to what it was before and make the problem go away?
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You know, information like that is really useful to the developers in trying to figure out
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where the problem is.
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The next thing that they're almost always going to ask you is, what were you doing when
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the problem occurred?
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So in the case of that video problem I had, you know, the machine crashed when I was,
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for instance, encoding a video.
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That's something I do a fair amount of.
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So it was pretty easy for me to make that connection and say, hmm, that's, there is
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the problem.
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The next thing is it reproducible, which means if I always do action X does result Y always
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occur.
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It's really useful to know that, you know, the hardest ones are the intermittent bugs
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where that's, well, I do action X and sometimes Y occurs and sometimes it doesn't.
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That's always a little bit harder.
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But the more you can trace that and say, yes, this is what happens.
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Try and do the same action over and over again and see if you get the result.
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That's a really good piece of information for the, because what you're trying to do is
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give the information to the developer to say, this is the problem, would you fix it?
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It's a wonderful feeling when the developers actually take your bug and fix it.
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And I've had that happen.
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But they can only do that if you give them the information.
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Next thing, do you have any log data to add to the report?
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Now in some distributions, they're trying to automate this.
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I know the folks that Ubuntu have been trying to build an automated bug reporting system
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that, when the bug, you know, if the system crashes, let us say, it's going to pop up a
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little applet that is going to file the bug and they will frequently be able to automatically
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access the right log files to get that information.
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That's wonderful.
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But it never hurts to get to know where your log data lives.
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For instance, the Command DMESG, great source of information, okay?
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And that's reading a file that you could include that, the output of that, include that
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in your bug report.
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And you might even be able to figure out how to read it and pull out some of the relevant
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details first.
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Finally, the one of the things you might want to do is you might want to check to see if
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the bug has already been submitted, okay?
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Now if that's the case, you may be able to add on to the report.
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You might be able to improve someone else's bug report.
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They might have just made some sort of vague thing of, yeah, you know, I installed this
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piece of software and it crashed.
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Well, you know, that's not really very helpful, but if you had the same problem and you
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know how to do a proper bug report, you could commit and say, hey, same thing happened
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to me.
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I was running this particular version of this distribution.
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I was running this particular version of this software and here's my hardware setup.
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And here's the attached log file that is going to have all of this wonderful information.
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And you know, you could really improve that.
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And I know from talking to George that a lot of the work that he and some of the other
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folks do with Ubuntu is finding these rather poorly written bug reports and improving them
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so that there's actually information there that the developers can use to do this.
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And I emphasize that because in most cases, developers want to fix the bugs.
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They take pride in their work.
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They want to do the right thing.
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But if you don't give them the information, oh, it's just, it's so terribly hard.
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Now, the other thing about checking to see if a bug has been submitted, think about it.
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Someone may already have the answer.
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Isn't that wonderful?
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So gosh, I'm doing such and such and you know, I installed this software, but it won't
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run.
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It gives this error message and crashes and I really want to run this software.
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And if you go looking what you might find is someone's going to say, oh, I know the
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answer to that.
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You need to change this one library and if you do that, everything will be wonderful.
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That's great information, okay?
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And the way you find that is by taking a look at the bugs, all right?
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So you go to look to the bug report, you see what's in there and you discover there is
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a solution, you apply it and all of a sudden you're happy because you get to do this.
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Now, I had a complicated one with a piece of software called Miro.
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Now, if you're not familiar with Miro, it is basically, it's for video podcasts and
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online video content.
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And I will just emphasize in this case that they're really focused on legal video content,
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all right?
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You know, if you're looking to download illegal bit torrent copies of the latest Hollywood
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movies, this is not the place you would go and I don't, if you're into that, you'll
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figure it out.
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I don't need to tell you about it.
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But I find Miro absolutely essential to me because there are a lot of video podcasts
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that I like to listen to to watch.
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And so what it does is it downloads all of them and then has a playback console that
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I can watch all of these videos and it's very, very convenient.
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So I had a problem.
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First thing, I upgraded my distro to the newest version and suddenly Miro doesn't work.
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Uh-huh.
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Okay, that happens.
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Then, okay, where's the problem?
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Miro doesn't play any videos.
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I started doing the troubleshooting.
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Can I play videos with other software?
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Could I use VLC?
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Could I use drag and, you know, and the other software was, no, no problem.
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They can play it just fine.
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All right, so obviously there's something going on here with Miro.
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In my case, I happen to have several computers with the same distro version, so I was able
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to test it there.
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Same problem on all of these different computers.
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So I filed a bug in actually in this case in two places.
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I filed it with the distro, which was Ubuntu in this case.
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And I also filed the bug with Miro.
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Now as it happens, I got to reply from the developer on the Miro project within a couple
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of hours.
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And he said, gee, I tried that exact distro version and I had no problems.
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Interesting.
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So how are we going to find out?
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He said, there's this log file.
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He told me where the log file is.
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And I said, great, I grabbed that log file and I sent it to him.
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And then he wrote back, again, within, you know, maybe an hour of me sending it to him,
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he wrote back and said, well, you know, looking at the log file, I'm seeing, this looks
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like your problem.
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It looks like it's missing a package.
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And I thought, OK, I checked, you know, using my package manager.
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And it told me that the package was installed.
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But as I say, this is a recently released upgrade to Ubuntu.
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So you know, things can go wrong with that.
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So what I did is I removed the package and reinstalled it.
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And then suddenly Miro is working.
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And I was able to go back and tell the developer exactly what had happened.
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And you want to do that because what, you know, someone else might come along, OK?
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And so I not only told the developer directly, but made sure that it was attached to the
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bug report that I had filed.
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So that if the next person comes along and takes a look at it and says, gee, I'm having
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this problem.
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They'll see that I had reported the bug.
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And this is the steps that I took and this fixed it and now I'm happy.
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And then if they follow that, they're going to be happy as well.
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So you know, when you create good bug reports, you help yourself and you help others.
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And I think that's such an important part of the community support.
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It doesn't cost any money.
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It does cost a little bit of your time.
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But that's what it means to have community supported software.
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So I encourage anyone listening to this.
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You know, the next time you get some annoyance, you know, some program crashes on you, don't
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just piss and moan and curse at people that the software isn't working the way you like.
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File a bug.
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And you know, you just might be responsible for making free software better for other
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people.
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Now, I want to mention something else because I am in addition to podcasting for hacker
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public radio, something I started doing at the beginning of 2012, but hopefully I'm going
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to be continuing.
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I'm also involved with Ohio Linux Fest.
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So I know that hacker public radio has a very international audience, but I'm sure that
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there are a lot of people who are in the Midwest of the United States who may be familiar
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with Ohio Linux Fest and perhaps even thinking about attending or what have you.
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And I would like to tell you that we have just opened up our call for talks.
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All right.
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We'll be doing the 2012 event at the end of September, September 28 through 30th, but most
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of the talks will be on the 29th, which is a Saturday.
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And what we're really looking at right now is trying to get some people to submit proposals
|
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to give a presentation.
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We're looking for just about anything that is related to free and open source software,
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free hardware, open hardware, with hardware when I say free, I mean, as in freedom, not
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necessarily free of charge, because hardware is going to cost money.
|
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But we're pretty broad about that.
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So just a quick list of some of the things, Zen, Samba, WordPress, BSD for the home user
|
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or in production, using Linux in a Windows world, open source in the view of a teenager,
|
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video editing, GNOME 3, KDE, IPv6, that'd be a great one, because we know that a lot of
|
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companies have said they're going to turn that on for good in June of this year, I'd like
|
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to know more about that.
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I'd love to have people talk about Android, so it's a pretty broad range of things.
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And the other thing is we look for variety in the levels of these things, so that it's
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not that everything is going to be aimed at CIS admins or that everything is going to
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be aimed at the newbies.
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We want to have a mix, we want to have all of those levels.
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So when we get these talks, we usually sort them out as beginner, intermediate and advanced
|
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and try and then select a good number from each of those three categories.
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So we'd love to have that, and the other thing is that we put a lot of effort into trying
|
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to be family friendly and trying to be as inclusive as possible.
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So we would love to have more women or minorities or just as much of a mix of people as we
|
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possibly can, and we really do, and I think if you talked to anyone who's been involved
|
||||
with us, we don't just talk to talk, we do our best to walk the walk on this one.
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So if you're interested, we have an announcement up on the web page, and I've put the URL
|
||||
into the show notes, so that'll make it easy for you.
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So I think that I'm going to sign off, this is a hookah, and it's been a pleasure talking
|
||||
to you, and I'll talk to you again.
|
||||
Bye.
|
||||
You have been listening to HackerPublic Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
|
||||
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday and Monday through Friday.
|
||||
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by a HPR listener by yourself.
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||||
If you ever consider recording a podcast, then visit our website to find out how easy
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it really is.
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||||
HackerPublic Radio was founded by the Digital Dark Pound and the Infonomicom Computer
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Club.
|
||||
HPR is funded by the binary revolution at binref.com, or binref projects are crowd-sponsored
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by linear pages.
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From shared hosting to custom private clouds, go to lunarpages.com for all your hosting
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Unless otherwise stasis, today's show is released under a creative commons, attribution,
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