Bug Report Turnaround Time

Hi Brennan. This is a question for the Ubuntu team rather than for Launchpad itself. I will redirect your question to them.

Your bug was initially responded to in less than a day, which itself usually does not happen. Bugs often remain open for very long periods of time. Less important bugs, or bugs that are extremely difficult to diagnose, sometimes remain open for a year or more (though that is neither extremely common nor considered desirable). This is the case in any large software project. Following the bug reporting guidelines at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs will generally increase the chances that you bug will be more useful to developers and thus work on faster and more efficiently, and with less initial delay. When possible, it is good to submit bug reports with Apport (even for non-crash bugs) as it automatically attaches important information. If a bug is not submitted with Apport, then some of that information can usually be attached with apport-collect.

Bugs are rarely fixed a mere 18 days after you file them, and when that does happen, it is usually because the bugs are extremely critical (e.g., serious security vulnerabilities or bugs preventing software from working at all for most users), or because the bug is in the development version of Ubuntu on which heavy work is being done, or both. I'll give a couple examples from personal experience. Bug 729065 was fixed 5 days after I reported it (it would potentially have affected all users seriously, and I was able to perform testing to assist in its diagnosis--it turned out that bug 718223, which was previously reported almost a month earlier, was actually the same problem, but the user who had reported that had not been able to provide as extensive information, and it was determined to be the same bug only after my bug was fixed). Similarly important bug 788710 was fixed 48 days after I reported it. Less important bug 695658 / bug 700686 (which would have affected all Ubuntu Server users and potentially confused many into think their systems were completely nonfunctional) was fixed 22 days after I reported it, but the fix didn't apply to all setups, so as bug 761830 it is still not fixed (so far 221 days have passed, or 115 days, depending on where you count from).

Occasionally, bugs go without fixing so long that all Ubuntu releases in which they occur reach end-of-life, and then the bugs are marked Won't Fix. This is far from being the most common scenario, but it is easy to find bugs where this has happened.

I am looking over your bug report, and I don't see the possibility of bad installation media ruled out. (That is, there's a chance your bug might not be a bug at all, but a condition you can pretty easily correct yourself.) Do you still have access to the hardware on which you had attempted to install Ubuntu? If so:

Did you MD5 test the .iso image before you burned it to CD/DVD or wrote it to the USB flash drive? (See https://help.ubuntu.com/community/HowToMD5SUM.) If not, please do that now. If that doesn't check out, you'll have to redownload the .iso image, MD5 test the new image, and (assuming the new one checks out) burn a new disc or write it to the USB flash drive again.

Did you verify that the live CD/DVD/USB was written correctly and is readable by the machine on which you're installing? To do that, boot from it, and immediately when you see the person and keyboard icons at the bottom center of the screen, press Spacebar, select your language, and select "Check disc for defects". (This goes for USB flash drives as well as CD's and DVD's.) If that doesn't check out, you'll have to burn a new disc or re-write the .iso image to the USB flash drive (and run this test on it again).