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Canonical have recently introduced a ticket system for Ubuntu Linux and other projects hosted on Launchpad. Like other help desk/ticketing systems it allows people who have problems installing or running Ubuntu Linux and other applications to post questions. The questions get answered by members of the community, not necessarily developers or employees of Canonical.

I have started to pick up a few of these questions and attempt to answer them myself, it's surprisingly easy to do with very little knowledge of Ubuntu Linux. I consider myself a bit of a Linux newbie myself. Although Linux usage is often a bit like the game of golf in that people often tell you they are less skilled than they really are. But honestly, I'm no expert in Linux, I've just been using it for a few years now, so have a little experience to share.

So how can anyone even attempt to answer technical questions - and then answer them satisfactorily - without knowing much about the product? Well, I'll tell you. Google.

People don't use search engines well enough, and even when they do they search for the wrong stuff and click the wrong results. If you have a strong google-gland then you can probably find the answer to most things or figure out where to find the answer, or be able to at the least identify a community who can help further. Google is of course just one resource at our disposal, and it can be a little hit-and-miss, even if you do get the right search terms. A targeted search at some Ubuntu specific sites for example might also be useful. More on those in a moment.

One of the problems with support tickets is that often people don't know how to fill them in effectively. For some people who have come from a Windows background, only having ever used it on their home computer, surprising though it may seem, they may never have had to fill in a support ticket before. So when they come to Ubuntu and something like their wireless card "doesn't work" they may fill out a support ticket like this:-

"I have installed Ubunto and the wireless doesn't work"

Clearly we don't have enough information to go on. However we can probably safely make an assumption that the user is a novice from this scant detail. Either that or their internet access is on a pay-per-pixel basis. What is worth knowing is that wireless can indeed be a problem on Linux based systems, so we should be mindful of the potential negative outcome to this issue. However the vast majority of wireless devices can be made to work in Linux via either choosing the right driver, or using utilities such as madwifi or ndiswrapper. Indeed it could be something as simple as the physical "kill" switch on the machine being switched on (and thus wireless switched off at the hardware level).

Of course one of our first priorities here is probably to get some more detail about the problem without scaring them off. So I probably wouldn't enter into a lengthy text about windows drivers, wireless manufacturers and obtuse compilation steps, command line tools and scripts, but instead suggest to them that most wireless cards can be made to work (a positive step to open the reply), and then indicate that more detail is required. If they can read the make and model from the device then great, alternatively they might be able to get more information from device manager - a term they may be familiar with from Windows. For example System -> Administration -> Device Manager on my PC shows the wireless card to be "Pro/Wireless LAN 2100 3B Mini PCI Adapter". When all else fails we can ask for the make and model of computer (assuming the wireless card came with the computer) so we can quickly google to find out for ourselves what model of wireless adapter it is.

All that could probably fit in 3 lines really:-

"The good news is that most wireless cards can be made to work, the bad news is that you didn't say which one you had. What make and model of wireless adapter is it that you are having problems with? If you don't know specifically, then you might be able to find out using System -> Administration -> Device Manager. Alternatively, if the adapter came with the computer, what make and model of computer is it?"

That took me less than a minute to type. Who says they don't have time to help Open Source projects! :D

Clearly there is the possibility that I personally won't be able to help them with their specific problem, that doesn't matter though, mine are but one pair of eyeballs watching the support tickets, and my reply will help anyone else who comes along to answer this ticket because they won't have to ask the same questions (assuming of course the original ticket submitter does actually reply).

Ok, so lets look at another hypothetical ticket which we can answer this time.

"When I boot my PC from the live CD, I get message '[yaddayadd:yaddayadda] Blah:Foo:Bar:Baz' which stays on the screen, and the screen stays black."

Oh dear, this isn't nice is it, someone has a computer that appears to not even get into the GUI (Gnome/KDE/XFCE). Now if we take a moment to think about this. There is a specific message that the user has given which help tremendously in the diagnosis process. They've said the screen stays black which likely means it's at the point when the kernel starts. The live CD boots in 'quiet' mode which means that you don't see most of what the kernel says, so anything it does say is usually a problem or warning of some kind.

They're probably not the first and only person to get this message unless they're using Linux on some wierd, very new or very old hardware. Most computers are made in batches of many thousands, so chances are there's a page on the web somewhere where someone also mentions the problem. A very quick google for sections of the error message might yield results. At this point I probably wouldn't add the word "ubuntu" to my google search term because the Linux kernel is used in all Linux distributions - not just Ubuntu, and as such the error might be reported on a Fedora, Gentoo or some other distros discussion forums, so best not to restrict our googling to one distro just yet. Although it would really be a good idea to search the Ubuntu Launchpad bug database separately. In addition there are the Ubuntuforums where lengthy discussion takes place. Ubuntuforums - and indeed all forums and public mailing lists too - can be a gold mine of information, but with lengthy threads spread over many pages it can be somewhat time consuming to find specific answers.

If we find a report of a bug then there is a button that allows us to link the ticket to the bug making it easier for others to find later. In fact if you mention in your reply the text bug 12345 then the ticket system will automatically create a link to that bug in the database.

So taking a couple of real-world examples it's not difficult to see how it's pretty easy to help out other members of the community. Neither of those took longer than a few minutes to evaluate and reply to. The tickets you reply to can be set to email you when someone replies, and you can even subscribe to the Ubuntu support ticket system and get all the replies for all tickets sent to you by email, and if you reply to the email it gets tacked onto the support ticket. Neat. As the number of tickets rises I might reconsider subscribing to all tickets, but for now it's an acceptable amount of mail to get.

As I write this there are under 2000 requests currently in the ticket system for Ubuntu, so clearly Ububtu either works so well that people don't need to ask questions (unlikely), there is a barrier in that they have to articulate their problem and may not know how to, or more likely they just don't know about the site.

It's currently quite difficult to find the ticket system from the front page of the ubuntu website, this is something that should be addressed (and indeed I've recorded a bug on Launchpad hoping to resolve this). In my opinion we should encourage Ubuntu users to use the ticket system when they have problems because it allows them to record their issues in a place where others can reply, but it's also searchable, public and right now a pretty friendly place to be. I like the community that Canonical and the Ubuntu users have built, and the ticket system is yet another example of how the community can help itself.

So next time you find yourself surfing idly on the web, or poking around a news website looking for something interesting to read, think of the tickets you could be reading, and the people you could be helping instead.