Comment 43 for bug 159594

I finally got this bug into a can yesterday. I thought it had gone away, but it started showing up again, though very rarely. Then yesterday, I found a way to reproduce it. At least it worked twice in a row. If someone will tell me what to do, maybe it will be possible to diagnose it now.

The situation that triggers the bug is on a completely fresh installation of the latest Ubuntu 9.10, with the updates to yesterday. As soon as the machine is booted, start Firefox, and then open a terminal window. The command "sudo update-grub" will ask for the password and then immediately go to the white screen of death. I'm not sure what to do from this position, or how to set up the machine to capture the required information, but this is the first time I've apparently found a way to reproduce the crash.

I want to help, and I'm willing to try to fix this OLD bug--but I admit that at this point I'm increasingly doubtful that Ubuntu is worth the effort. I am pretty strongly motivated by my love of freedom, and my desire to be free of Microsoft and Apple--but Ubuntu seems to be going in the wrong direction in terms of offering a viable option that will bring us more freedom. I absolutely cannot recommend recent versions of Ubuntu to anyone. This 9.10 release is totally crippled in the sound on many machines that I've tested, which already tells me that they testing was totally inadequate. This old bug of the WSOD is still around after a couple of years, so it is obvious that the real cause has never been found and fixed. I desperately want Ubuntu to succeed, but it is increasingly obvious that this economic model is NOT working to provide sufficient testing.