Following on from my recommendation for apt-buglist where you can see the reported bugs on a package before installing it I thought it might be useful to look at the other side of the coin, reporting bugs in Debian. The best way to do this is with the dedicated tool: reportbug.

KDE today announced the immediate availability of KDE SC 4.5 Beta2. 1459 new bugs have been reported, and 1643 bugs have been closed, so we're witnessing a lot of stabilization.

The policy requirements for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution include the structure and contents of the Debian archive, several design issues of the operating system, as well as technical requirements that each package must satisfy to be included in the distribution.

Tracking and squishing bugs (both the six-legged and the computer software kind) is hard, and you need all the help you can get.

Since the turn of the decade or so, it's been regularly reported that every year will be the year during which Linux finally breaks out of its box and gains a major foothold at the desktop level. It hasn't happened yet.

I read glyphobet's blog, itemizing frustrations he's had reporting bugs to Ubuntu. While I've not had frustrating experiences reporting bugs to Ubuntu, I've reported bugs to a lot of different open source projects, and had more than a few closed in a way I wasn't happy with, so I can definitely sympathize. I hope in Ubuntu these sorts of experiences are the exception, but certainly there's always room to improve.

In my own experience at having bugs closed in ways I thought were inappropriate or incorrect, while I was initially angry about it, after reflecting I realized in each case it was really a consequence that I didn't understand that particular project's bug philosophy and had filed the bug in a way that didn't adhere to their guidelines.

Red Hat continues to demonstrate its dominance of the enterprise Linux market. The company reported a blow-out third quarter, with total revenue of $135.4 million, an increase of 28% from the year ago quarter and 6% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue was $115.7 million, up 30% year-over-year and 6% sequentially.

Right before Christmas, KDE has published the first candidate for the upcoming release of KDE 4.6.0. The focus at this stage is on fixing bugs and completing translations and artwork. As such, the rework of the Oxygen icon set is nearing completion, many bugs reported by testers in the past weeks have been fixed and stabilization is still in full swing.

This is to announce tar 1.24, a new stable release of GNU tar (an archiving program designed to store and extract files from an archive file known as a tarfile). This release fixes several bugs found in the previous 1.23. Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and suggestions. Special thanks to Paul Eggert for his hard work on this release.