Mark Shuttleworth Responds to Ubuntu breakage

Mark Shuttleworth has responded on his blog about the Ubuntu update breakage that occurred last week.

If there is a silver lining to the error, it is that it happened during the one week in six months when we have the core distribution development team together in one place. This gave us the opportunity not just to analyse and fix the issue, and to talk about the sequence of events that led to the problem, but also to discuss the processes we must improve to further reduce the likelihood of a repeat. The team is now more aware than ever of the responsibility we assume given extraordinary rate of adoption of Ubuntu.

It's a well-written piece, and left (at least) myself with a restored confidence in the Ubuntu team for taking this as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

Ubuntu Update Breaks Xorg

Oops.

At least I had the benefit of seeing this thread before I updated my machine. If you've got an Ubuntu 6.06 machine, I suggest not doing any Xorg-related updates until this is fixed.

Judging from the number of posts and views in that thread and the small amount of time it's been up, I think this is one's a biggie.

If you've already busted your X server, or expect you're going to do it by accident, write down the solution:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core=1:1.0.2-0ubuntu10

Edit: There's a sticky at the Ubuntu Forums outlining a slightly different fix.

I think this is pretty much the Ubuntu team's nightmare right here - Pushing out a regular security update or bug fix that ends up breaking every user's system. (At least it's repairable, although I think any non-power user would have a hard time finding the fix.)

The shock factor for a new user when they reboot their PC and are greeted by a friendly non-graphical login is going to leave quite the mark on Ubuntu's good reliability record.
(I have a machine at work set to automatically install security updates, I wonder if it's going to get busted too...)