Re: 8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

On 2008-07-24, Karl Larsen <k5di@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Grant Edwards 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):


Which other distros have you loaded on this computer?

None.

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".


You seem to have an issue with the loader software. Was it too

simple for an expert like yourself? As I recall the network part of the
loader was preset and you just hit Enter and go on.

I've no clue what you're talking about. Other distros (e.g.
Gentoo) typically provide "firmware" packages that alleviate
the need for the user to manually download files, binary
extracters, etc.

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.

Well don't stop there. Explain what link-local IP discovery
is? I didn't know Hardy had any.

Google it, dude.

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.

Now that is a really stupid thing to do!

Why is that? It's seemed (according to the forums) to be the
only easy way to prevent the autoipd from seizing control of
interfaces. And it seems to have sovled that problem.

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.

Which chipset would that be?

Broadcom 4306

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.

Yes and that is really hard to do isn't it. Poor boy.

It's something that other distros seem to be able to do
automatically on startup.

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.

Gosh a password too? What kind of WiFi are you stealing?

What is your damange? It's my own network. Entering the
password via the network config applet doesn't work. Entering
it via wpa_cli does. That means the network manager applet is
broken.

I'm not going to ask a lifelong Windows user to spend a
half-hour with a bash prompt typing commands everytime she
want's wireless networking to start.

Maybe this is the whole problem. If you had just loaded Hardy
and rebooted and did the little easy things and then let it
just sit turned on for 30 minutes, it might have just started
working. Mine did.

Having to wait 30 minutes for a network interfaces is _not_
"working".

End result: a waste of about 8 hours of my time and a black eye
for Linux.

From my experience with Hardy it had zero problem with the
network. On this computer it found the ethernet card and
worked. On my laptop it loaded and after a few minutes it
discovered WiFi and worked.

Well bully for you. I found plenty of other postings in the
Forum complaining about the above problems, so it's not just
me.

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! I invented skydiving
at in 1989!
visi.com


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