Comments on: Things that used to work in Ubuntu Intrepid but broke in Karmic

By: Bruce

Bruce — Fri, 21 May 2010 03:44:08 +0000

Yes, life is too short to waste on this crap. I’ve been trying for hours to get wireless to work on my Dell Inspiron with Karmic. It becomes a mission–you want to beat it. But then you ask yourself, Is this why I have a computer, to solve jigsaw puzzles I didn’t ask for? In contrast, I have an old iBook G4 that picks up wireless perfectly every time.

In the end it comes down to what time you can afford to troubleshoot. I’m almost all out.

By: Marie

Marie — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 04:19:35 +0000

Jaunty works great for me, but Karmic was a disaster (screen resolution issues and false disk notification errors among other things!)…so back to Jaunty. From now on, I’m only sticking with the LTS versions…they tend to work better all around….will hold on to Jaunty until Lynx LTS.

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 14:57:30 +0000

I was almost out of time before, but now I’m done. I tried a few more things but couldn’t get wireless to work. To add to the debacle, network manager, I discovered, was wiping the resolv.conf file every time I switched to wired. That meant I had to continually re-add nameserver entries to resolv.conf to get Internet connectivity! I think it’s a little too polite to call that a bug (and I believe it has been reported as one).

The old adage, “if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it” doesn’t seem to apply at Canonical, and with each new release you hold your breath wondering what got through unscathed and what is now going to ruin your day. They ought to hire someone other than Mickey Mouse to do the testing for them. That resolv.conf mess is just ridiculous.

Fortunately, it’s not critical for me at the moment to have wireless on my Dell. A couple of years back when I was more enthusiastic, I’d probably have spent another day on it regardless, but I’ve learned to quit and be more productive on other things.

By: Alex Cabal

Alex Cabal — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 11:17:56 +0000

That’s probably the best way I’ve heard Linux described: solving a jigsaw puzzle that you didn’t ask for. I feel like that very often when using Ubuntu. But will things ever get better if they’re struggling with compatibility for 3 year old laptops when there’s brand new hardware coming out every day?

By: Stephen

Stephen — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 07:11:40 +0000

In the end it comes down to what time you can afford to troubleshoot. I’m almost all out.