bug reporting - What tools exist to report bugs

As of today I only knew about ubuntu-bug which I could use to report bugs about a specific program. But now I learned about apport-collect and apport-bug which basically are:

apport-bug - Reports problems to launchpad using Apport to collect a lot of information about your system to help the developers fix the problem and avoid unnecessary questions and answers.

apport-collect - Works as apport-bug but it send the information to an already existing bug report. In my case it was apport-collect 1060268 Thanks to Brad Figg in Launchpad.

Are there any other tools to report bugs?

ubuntu-bug and apport-bug are actually the same package Apport. When you initiate ubuntu-bug or apport-bug without any additional parameters, one of the following Apport user-interfaces is called, depending on the desktop environment:

Apport User interfaces for filing bugs

• apport-gtk - GTK GUI for reporting crash-type bugs in Unity and GNOME.


• apport-kde - KDE GUI for reporting crash-type bugs in KDE.


• apport-cli - command-line front-end for reporting crashes and is intended for use on servers. You can also use it to report bugs if the crash happens offline.

Do note that Apport is NOT enabled by default. You have to manually enable it in order to report crash-type bugs:

You can also report issues other than application crashes using any of the above tools with an additional parameter -f. It is not necessary to enable Apport for reporting non-crash issues. See manual page for apport-cli for more information.

Other Apport utilities

• apport-collect - Used to collect and attach essential debugging data to an existing bug report. Generally used in case of bugs filed against Linux kernels. You should not be using this unless you are the original bug reporter or one of the kernel developers explicitly asks you to do so. See manual page for apport-collect for more information.

Whoopsie service

All 12.04 systems, including desktop and server, have an "Ubuntu Error Reporting" daemon called whoopsie. It, along with apport, is part of the Ubuntu error tracker project. While it isn't one of the tools that allow you to report bugs, it is part of the system that processes the bug reports.

See also:

Debian bug reporting tools

There also exists reportbug which helps you file bug directly in Debian bug tracker from an Ubuntu system. However, reportbug is not installed by default in Ubuntu and can be installed by issuing this command in a terminal:

sudo apt-get install reportbug