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Ubuntus star shines a little less brightly since a recently released patch knocked out its users graphical user interface.
Affected users saw—the horror, the horror—a blue screen of death. While this screen had more useful information than the Microsoft blue screen, it still wasnt useful to confused users.
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS users who installed updates between 17:30 UTC on Monday, Aug. 21, and 10:00 UTC on Tuesday, Aug. 22, were the ones affected by this problem.
A note to users on Ubuntus Web site said, “An update to the windowing system in Ubuntu was incorrectly released for Ubuntu 6.06 LTS.
When applied to Ubuntu 6.06, the patch inadvertently breaks the desktop windowing environment on some systems.”
It went on, “When we learned of the problem, the patch was immediately withdrawn. Mirrors have also been disabled to ensure that the faulty patch isnt available from them.
We have launched an investigation and formal quality process review to understand exactly how this happened and what corrective actions to take.”
While users could reach a command line interface, many new Ubuntu users were still confused as to what to do about the problem.