My first Debian bug report

Today I filed my first Debian bug report.

I commanded the system to upgrade to the most recent version of Debian Testing packages, as I do each few days (except for mandatory-stable-software freeze periods before important lectures or demonstrations).

This time, upgrade of the hal package failed, due to failure of the /etc/init.d/dbus-1 script to start. I worked around the problem by stopping dbus-1 and rerunning the installer.

Then, I filed a bug report using ‘reportbug’. It was assigned the bug number 277179. The nicest thing was that I did not have to manually collect information about my system configuration or package versions. ‘reportbug’ did this automatically for me.

(Then I found that other people already reported the bug (bug No. 274702).)

Isn’t it great that it is so easy to report bugs!

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.