“Is this going to be a standup fight, sir, or another bughunt?”

Quoting as I have from Aliens I had to write about my first experience in the bug reporting process for Ubuntu. At present I have not discovered a bug that I could directly report back to Ubuntu. So either I am not using Ubuntu hard enough or I am not the power user of super geek qualities. No matter the reason I wanted to be ready and wanted to be prepared to “do my bit” and report those bugs.

Like all well trained system administrators and support personal Google was my first inquiry. Searching for “Ubuntu Bug reporting” generated the reason for this blog post. Whilst I am can be assured that this bug has been commented on in the past, a quick Google showed me that it has not been commented on recently.

The central repository for reporting bugs within Ubuntu has been Launchpad. Clearly Mr Shutleworth has a keen sense of irony that the first Bug reported should be the last bug fixed. In the bug report Mark Shuttleworth has informed the Ubuntu community that

“Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace. This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix.”

Alan has previously posted about contributing and giving back to the community in terms of support and bug fixes, this particular Bug report is a great example of one such bug that does not require Guru like technical skills or Neo styled hacking abilities. To resolve this will require commitment and direction from the Ubuntu community to the discovery, reporting and resolving the daily issues for the every day user. Creating an environment which results in vendors and manufacturers discovering a committed and interested community willing to support their products.

Resolving this bug by ensuring that every Personal Computer purchased by a member of the public , private client or civil service is provided with the choice of operating system.

I can see many ways to ensure that this will occur, by using the tools provided to us such as the Shipit CDs, User groups , BNI, FSB , Microbiz and other resources. We need only tackle this bug one desktop and one user at a time. Each new user who gains the benefit of this bug fix becomes the next promoter, advocate and salesman in aiding the community in marking this bug as resolved.

Thanks for reading.

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