Dec

6

Upstream to ease debugging pain

Tagged with ,  

There are great community support options for many Linux distributions, and people do use them. Here’s the official Ubuntu support channel right now:

IRC support channel

989 people.

Now, even 100 newbies can have a lot of problems and questions, and most of the time new users are not very good at describing the problem they are having. They don’t know how the system works, they don’t know about log files, let alone their locations.

A large part of the traffic on the #ubuntu channel consists of discussions similar to this:

nubi: help! my linux is broken! none of my cool games work, only minesweeper and same game

master_foo: so you're saying tetris works but doom3 doesn't?

nubi: yeah

master_foo: sounds like your graphics acceleration doesn't work. which graphics card do you have?

nubi: huh? how do i know?

master_foo: could you paste your dmesg, xorg.conf, the x error log, and the output of lspci and lsmod to the pastebin?

nubi: of course not. what are those things and where do i find them? i just want to fix enemy territory!

Then begins the endless hunt for log files and trying to upload them to a public pastebin for debugging, while trying to ignore the 200 other discussions going on at the same time on the channel. None of this is very much fun.

That will change once we get Upstream integrated into our distributions. Upstream is a nice python utility that changes the part of finding and uploading relevant log files into this:

Intro

Name

Description

Submission
Done

Now the discussion can be more like this:

nubi: help! my linux is broken! none of my cool games work, only minesweeper and same game

master_foo: you're having video problems: fear not, nubi! run the Upstream Log Uploader from the System menu

nubi: ok found it

master_foo: tick the "video" and "kernel" options, then follow the instructions. when you're done, paste here the url you get

nubi: http://paste.ubuntu-nl.org/123456

master_foo: i'll take a look at that and your problems are solved in no time at all

nubi: wow this is so cool. upstream changed my life

master_foo: yes, the upstream team really is a valiant and talented group of people

nubi: i agree. debugging was never so easy before.

Of course, master_foo himself rocks just as much, for volunteering to be there for nubi on his own valuable time!

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