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One of the new things that is going to be in karmic is that the kerneloops daemon will be installed and running by default. This tool, created by Arjan van de Ven, watches the kernel logs for problems. It has a companion service, kerneloops.org which aggregates reports of these problems, and can sort by kernel version and the like. This allows kernel developers to spot the most commonly encountered problems, areas of the code which are prone to bugs etc. When the kerneloops daemon catches a problem it allows you to send the problem to kerneloops.org.

We however, are not using the applet that comes with kerneloops to do this, we are making use of the brilliant Apport. There are a couple of reasons for this. We also want to make it easy for you to report these issues as bugs to Launchpad, and we don't want to prompt you with two different interfaces to do that.

The changes mean that if your machine has a kernel issue you will get an apport prompt as usual. As well as asking if you would like to report the problem to Launchpad like it does for other crashes it will ask if you would also like to report it to kerneloops.org. Passing the information through apport means that it can also be used on servers as well without running X.

Hopefully you will never see this improvement, but it's now going to be there for when those bugs do creep in.