8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[Mario Spinthiras]

I would suggest using wicd a try instead of NetworkManager. NM gave me woes
which I was not willing to go any further to fix. Wicd replaces NM out of
the box. The gui might not be the same (nice and funky) but wicd seemed like
a better choice. Have it running for about 5 days now and its very nice.

Regards,
Mario

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Grant Edwards <grante at visi.com> wrote:

> I keep reading reviews about how Ubuntu "just works", so I
> decided to give it a try by installing Ubuntu 8.04 as an
> alternative OS on a laptop belonging to somebody who normally
> uses Windows, but would be willing to give Linux a try.
>
> I'd have to say that the networking support seems to quite a
> mess (at least compared to other distros I use):
>
>  1) There's a daemon called avahi-autoipd that keeps starting
>     up and f*&king up the network configuration.  I configured
>     the interfaces to use DHCP.  That means that if there's no
>     response from a DHCP server, then keep trying until there
>     _is_ a response from a DHCP server.  I don't recall
>     checking a box that said "only use DHCP until you get
>     bored and want to pull an IP address out of your ass".
>
>     I've never seen even a single network that uses link-local
>     IP discovery.  I'm sure it's cool in theory, but why
>     that's enabled by default is beyond understanding.
>
>     Disabling it in the services applet doesn't help either --
>     you've got to fire up a terminal window and apt-get remove
>     the package.
>
>  2) Firmware for the the wireless chipset had to be manually
>     downloaded, extracted (using a utility that had to be
>     built from a source tarball), and copied into
>     /lib/firmware.
>
>  3) I've configured the wireless interface to use WPA, but
>     wpa_supplicant doesn't start on boot-up.  You've got to
>     fire up a terminal and do "/etc/init.d/network restart" to
>     get wpa_supplicant running.
>
>  4) Once wpa_supplicant is running, the network management
>     applet seems incapable of configuring wpa_supplicant with
>     the password. It's unable to associate until one fires up
>     a terminal, starts wpa_cli, and sets the password
>     manually.
>
> End result: a waste of about 8 hours of my time and a black eye
> for Linux.
>
> --
> Grant
>
>
>
>
> --
> ubuntu-users mailing list
> ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at:
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-users/attachments/20080724/46c4798f/attachment.html>