Ubuntu's latest OS not so Gutsy
Ubuntu fanboys have been crying into their beers after discovering internet connection problems with Canonical's latest open source Linux distribution operating system, dubbed the Gutsy Gibbon. The latest version (7.10) of the increasingly popular free OS, which launched last week, was punted to the masses by Ubuntu as being " …
"....crying into their beers"
Surely that should have been "their beards"?
It's never a good idea to be the first to download any new OS. Expert users can always fix their own problems, but really, normal users should wait a week before migrating. At least, that gives time for critical issues to surface, and the release notes to be fixed. [To be fair to Ubuntu, if this were Microsoft, I'd be advising 18 months!]
So its not just wpa and wpa-supplicant ubuntu has a problem with anymore, its the Internet in general... Quick! Someone alert the Chinese Government!
Should only be installed when the user doing the install consciously selects it. I've had many issues with packages that had ipv6 support compiled in.
Internet access works fine for me, straight out of the box. Just had to enter my wireless security settings and bingo, Bob's your Auntie's live in lover :)
I haven't had any connection problems with 7.10 so far
I am an unashamed Ubuntu user and have to admit that my eager pounce on 7.10 may qualify me as a fanboy, but I have to say, this post on the forum goes very nicely with the signature...
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I get this error 2
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Anything Windows can do.....Linux can do better
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Guess I'll hang onto Feisty a little longer then. :)
If you have an IPv6 stack active on Linux without IPv6 connectivity, you may well run into problems.
This is because if you resolve the name of some DNS servers you get both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses:
ns1.ja.net. 127654 IN A 194.81.227.226
ns1.ja.net. 86375 IN AAAA 2001:630:0:44::e2
...and if you have both an IPv6 and an IPv4 stack, guess which one is used in preference? Even if you don't get a DHCP'd IPv6 address, you'll still have a "link-local" one. So you end up not getting a reply from that nameserver, until you either end up talking with one which does not have an IPv6 address too, or your OS falls back to using the IPv4 address.
The solution is not to enable the IPv6 unless you actually have IPv6 connectivity. This is a config issue IMHO...
You've 1) configured your PC to use DHCP to discover network resources, then 2) misconfigured your DSL router to report it's own internal IP address as a valid DNS server, and now 3) you're reporting Gutsy's correct use of the discovered DNS server as 'a major flaw in Linux's handling of DNS' ?
RTFM.
I am guessing that if this had been another windows horror story there would have been hundreds of comments saying I told you so, get Ubuntu it’s the dogs gonads.
I have just upgraded my PC (processor, memory, hard disk, motherboard, memory, you know, just a minor tweak!) in order to run Vista, I know, I know just another mindless drone but I put the disk in, told it what country I was in and then had a couple of beers, came back and everything just worked (Then I spent a lot of time installing my anti-spam, firewall, anti-virus etc etc and downloading masses of updates).
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an M$ Fanboi, just a lazy, lazy man.
All the bits I've got left over are going into another case so I can have a good look at Ubuntu, should be far more challenging than my window$ PC :-)
This is a total fabrication; untrue in every aspect. Please keep the OS bashing to Microsoft and Apple, where they belong. Thank you.
While my update to GG went okay, and I can actually connect my desktop to the network and Internet, Firefox now crashes at the drop of a Javascript. Most annoying.
I swear (literally) the system's slower too. There's bloat in them thar hills...
ie, Ubuntu insisting on preferring IPv6 even though it's used virtually nowhere in the real world. I complained about it then and got no sense from them. The pedants have taken over at Canonical; it's time to find the next pragmatic distro, run (for the moment) by people who understand that having things actually work is more important than having them idealogically sound...
I don't have any trouble at all connecting with Gutsy - the only thing that didn't work for me was sound, but the latest version of the alsa drivers fixed that right up.
I had internet connection problems with Gutsy, but I fixed them by using OpenDNS. I expect the Ubuntu team will release some updates to the network manager.
Oh come on.
IF you're going to throw mud at the latest Ubuntu, can you at least find mud that will affect more than a few hundred ubergeeks worldwide? (How many UK ISPs support IPv6, for example? Less than a handful, I think you'll find).
IPv6 has been the "next big thing" now for over a decade. In that time the world of OSI networks (intended to solve some of the same problems, eg autoconfiguration and huge address space) has been and gone. Really, there's no need for anyone to panic yet because Ubuntu's IPv6 is less than perfect, doubtless there are other Linuxes whose IPv6 does work (see, that's the nice thing about Linux, so many to choose from, many slightly different, some very different).
The blog entry will tell you half of what you might need to know to get firefox going, but this is making microadjustments to the stable door, as all the stuff which should have been installed from the internet when you installed the OS didn't happen, and other things like Pidgin remain broken. If you do hit this problem, you really need to go and do a clean install somewhere where you can get a working network connection during the installation. If you're lucky and do the mods before going home, it may work.
I hit the same problems in dapper and edgy, feisty worked, and now the same symptoms are back. I don't have access to a "working" network to do a good install, so gutsy is a non-starter for me. Even if I did, it would give me no confidence to try and connect to someone else's network, so Ubuntu Gutsy is a non-starter for me and my laptop, which is a pity. Worse than that, I could not recommend it to anyone who wanted to try linux.
This issue hardly got any exposure in previous releases, so I can only hope that it gets enough this time around to get sorted properly by the next release. Meanwhile, feisty works for everything except the built in wireless (in the kernel from 2.6.23) and what I have seen of Gutsy looked very nice. My laptop middleman (you can't call them a manufacturer - its an OEM job via Medion) can't be bothered to do the right thing and make a working web complaint form, and I'm not paying and wasting my time on their phone support, so I can't even push them for an XP licence until MS make the Vista home bastard it came with work properly (the wireless driver just got updated to allow you the full horror of trying to copy files using Vista).
Yeah, that's bad...
On the other hand, I switched from OpenSuSE 10.2 to Kubuntu 7.10 on my old 1.2 GHz, 1 Gb RAM computer (with cable Internet) and had no problem myself. It is much faster now, I even experimented with running Windows 2000 inside VirtualBox and it performs perfectly. And I had no trouble with anything in my hardware. I wonder what is the problem with the other machines, maybe newer ones are not as well supported...
Hmm...my Vista has no such troubles.
Meh.
Love.
Well, *one* reader reports having problems. That certainly spells doom for Ubuntu.
I upgraded with no problems whatsoever.
I installed Ubuntu 7.10 last week, the first time I have ever used Linux - no problems with the internet connection, nothing to configure at all. Connected via ethernet cable to a Netgear router. Typing this through Firefox on ubuntu 7.10 now...
The upgrade install hung on my Fiesty laptop (HP dv4000) very late in the process, forcing me to do a clean install. I was very disappointed, because it took so damn long, most of which time was spent downloading packages. I was expecting that the upgrade install could either run from the CD or fetch some needed packages from the CD, but I didn't see any obvious way to do that.
Gutsy itself has not given me any of the connectivity problems reported in this article. Video support for my crappy i810 card is better, but I still can't figure out how to use the new "Screens and Graphics" and "Screen Resolution" widgets to do the one thing I still really need to be able to do, which is switching to and from the external monitor w/o a reboot.
So far Gutsy seems slower than Fiesty. The indexing feature doesn't help at all, and I have it dialed down as far as it will go. If it persists in slowing me down I'll disable it entirely and see if that doesn't do the trick.
Having switched from Mac OS, which I got fed up with because of its poor performance, I can say that I really miss how easy it is to do upgrade installs on that platform. But I have zero sentimental attachment to the spinning beach ball of death.
Ubuntu or any other OS will never jump over its "small genetic pool" threshold and all associated with it problems until they completely change the strategy. It's like in sport, nobody cares about the second. The top management has to go not on their conferences of geeks and supporters for next 6 months but instead (ready?) go to schools and even homes for retired and listen what 10-graders and elders will tell them how the top layer of GUI must be implemented. On this front layer, which is most difficult to master (and you think it's simple?), it does not have to exhibit a single bump or logical glitch and has to be completely transparent. Almost like on smartphone interface. Upgrades must be one click only, the file structure, on the surface, of minimal abstraction etc. All the nuts and bolts, like in a car, must be hidden under the hood where more complex layers of OS have to be for pro, geeks, and the rest.
With that in mind only Ubuntu will become "Jesus OS" smashing all others with its adoption to cosmic heights. Or continue stay in 0.5% adoption rate misery This is what is shuttleworthit thinking of. Or others will eventually come and do that, "the saint place is never empty"(c).
I admit the title of the post is inflammatory, but "...not so Gutsy" come on. I installed the pre-release of Gutsy on an HP desktop and everything worked just fine. I had Fiesty and found Gutsy faster. I don't appear to be in the minority, so I suggest you test the system before you write about it. By the way I am a fanboy of Ubuntu and love windows XP. There I gave you all the ammo that you need for the personal attacks. All I will say in response is Get your facts right or work at a tabloid.
/Michael Brinkley
No problems on my Athlon 1800, 1gb test bed. However this was a fresh install and not an upgrade.
Have run Kubuntu and Xubuntu 7.10 on a zonbox with nary a connection problem at all, and I'm an "intermediate" level user - I can follow a fair bit of what the ubergeeks say, but aren't brave enough to try much of it unless I REALLy have to. And thus far - I haven't had to, I've been firmly in "user-mode" with Ubuntu 7.10.
I DID encounter a problem with sound not working a few weeks ago, but that was fixed in one of the more recent release candidates.
This isn't a major flaw in the system, in fact the only problem I have had since the upgrade to gutsy is my usbhostfs program doesn't stream the content I want to my PSP any more.
Umbongo? Hahahaha! These funny sounding African words, eh! Gosh, they're all the same.
A little pathetic.
Anyway, now that Orlowski seems bored with poking Wikipedia with a stick, rubbish articles about minor issues in Ubuntu seem the order of the day. Iconoclasm is fine, Reg, but do it with a scintilla of style, or you just look like a boring Uncle in the corner who goes on about "them lot" and farts for attention.
Seriously, the article talks about "one" person...
Of the issues new users are dealing with, the network stuff really isn't standing out as causing problems, in fact, it seems network issues are in the minority by a long shot...
http://ubuntuforums.org and check yourselves rather than read this no-news.
Powered mine up the other day - told me there was a new version available. Downloaded just over 700MB of files and it worked perfectly - this is on an old Toshiba SA30-203. No DNS issues, no connectivity issues at all... but then again I've not got IPv6 enabled and why the hell would I?
BTW : your link to the Ubutnu Forums comes back with "Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms."
Feisty was fine for me, but gutsy was doing acpi hangs within seconds of boot. (Finally tracked to processor.ko)
I reported the bug on launchpad 4 weeks before launch but could not get anyone at canonical to even notice it.
It's been noticed now.
Still, I get what I pay for and it's a bargain at that - no automatic lockout if I change hardware, no software audits or severe penalties (lose the house and gaoltime).
I also get the chance to help debug in a "meaningful" way.
Sam
I'd like to pay for support
I had to shoehorn a few things to make it all work on my laptop. No network issues though.
In the process I learned not to turn off the friction on the wobbly windows settings then move the settings window to see what it looks like.
- Hides while other perple try it.
There will be minor hiccups with bleeding edge software! I still have problems with the newest Linux kernel in itself. Using the latest kernel means that by default the hard drive that I boot from isn't referenced by /dev/hda2, its referenced by some UUID number which looks worse than an IPV6 address.
But, the point is that, there are new features and new features present bugs. Granted I've had issues with mounting my home directory on a separate partition during the Gutsy install and VNC seemed to not accept passwords, but I worked around that, cause hey... its new software.
If I wanted things to work right out of the box, I would have bought a calculator! No OS software works without hiccups.
Umbongo? Hahahaha! These funny sounding African words, eh! Gosh, they're all the same.
A little pathetic.
No actually it is (or was a little drink).
Way down deep in the middle of the Congo, A hippo took an apricot, a guava and a mango. He stuck it with the others and he danced a dainty tango. The rhino said, "I know... we'll call it Um Bongo!" Um Bongo, Um Bongo, they drink it in the Congo! The python picked the passion-fruit, The marmoset the mandarine, the parrot painted packets that the whole caboodle landed in. So when it comes to sun and fun and goodness in the jungle, they all prefer the sunny, funny one they call Um Bongo!
No problems at all here with Network connections or DNS
...there's PCLinuxOS 2007.
All the flavor and none of the beardy hippie calories.
don't change OS's if you don't have a crying need not if it works basically you get the best fit of hardware to kernel and freeze it there if you get a new computer you go back and get the latest otherwise your wasting time and going to have all kinds of problems. Stop playing with your OS and get to work.
Upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy a couple of days ago using apt-get without any problems whatsoever. The only change I made was to ditch ndiswrapper and use the built-in bcm43xx support in the kernel, which was a conscious decision. Everything is as it was - makes me wonder why I bothered really...
Well, I kind of like the negative tone. Must go with my unfortunately negative personality--but it makes it hard to tell when they actually have some grounds for complaint.
Anyway, I haven't had any problems with a couple of Gutsy 7.10 upgrades, and haven't noticed any performance problems. There was one minor network-related glitch on one Sharp notebook, and the glitch wasn't cured by Gutsy, though it is slightly less glitchy now. I might do another machine today if my other work is low enough.
xp became unworkable (again) on one of my boxes . an ancient asrock board. compared to an sp2 install on xp it was a dream, faster, and less intervention, and no demand for driver disks after install i have had no trouble with net access. Frankly my HP 1220 all in one is more of a pain in the arse to install.
Use bleeding edge, get cut. Any new release is bound to have issues. At least the Ubuntu crowd will probably have these things fixed in a week or two, unlike some other operating systems I could name where it takes then 2 months just to admit there's a problem.
I'm still on Dapper for my test stations. It works. I don't need it to do more than what it does. So I'm not changing. People who change for the sake of change really shouldn't be listened to when they whine about it.
Gusty works great for me on both my laptop and desktop, the Edubuntu version of Gusty works fine for my daughter too.
All I had to do was put the WPA key in for the laptop and my daughters system and bingo :)
I upgraded from Feisty to Gutsy online, I had a few problems with errors on installation, but it seemed to fix itself by doing an update. I used it for a few hours. Then I made the mistake of rebooting; suddenly no network. (though wireless came up and connected)
I looked in the network admin tools and saw no IPV4 address. At this point I went into terminal command line and did an ifconfig to look for more clues. That just confirmed there was no IPV4 address allocated, but the network was "up"
I then set the IPV4 address manually and bingo! I was on the network again.
Problem worked around in ten minutes. I thought it was my BT Home Hub DHCP playing up again - but that's another thread.
Now, let me tell you about my ongoing problems with Vista and the USB disk drive that is no longer recognised and the constant Bluetooth errors and ...
I too had many problems with the "Networking" and connecting. I could do it, but had to constantly "fiddle" with it.
So, I wiped my hard drive and I will wait until they either fix it or find another version that I like.
sf
It's not just Ubuntu. Debian (on which Ubutu is based) seems to have trouble as well. And after much head-scratching, I found it's mostly related to IPv6 (which, along with nuclear fusion and the GNU HURD, is future tech and always will be).
Blacklisting the "ipv6" module, or (if you're well 'ard) recompiling the kernel without IPv6 support, makes it behave perfectly.
Also, the newest Apache is *very* fussy about its configuration file syntax. A slight error in httpd.conf or any included file, or an absent or misbehaving internet connection, can slow the system bootup process to a crawl. If you've specified your virtual hosts by hostname (something like <VirtualHost something.mydomain.co.uk:80>), Apache insists to perform a DNS lookup -- or wait for it to time out -- on every one of those hostnames before starting up.
I guess I ought to patch the initscript and have it ping the nameservers and make sure they are available *before* starting the daemon, *before* my next forced reboot .....
I'm a little tired of the infantile "umbongo" play on words too.
Dull,dull writing.
What a poor piece of journalism, reminds me of when I used to read treeware.
Fair enough if there is a problem with Ubuntu, point it out, but the problem is actually with routers that don't handle IPv6 properly.
Mind you reporters are mostly more interested in the "story" than the "facts".
..was overwhelmingly good. I had Fiesty 7.04 installed, with a fair number of custom tweaks (most of which were broken because I'm an idiot), did the upgrade from the package manager.. kept working while it was upgrading, rebooted and voom, pretty much everything works perfectly. I still have one minor annoyance that has resulted from my own configurations in fiesty, but everything else works perfectly.
In fact, I discovered I needed to print something off my printer, which happens to be plugged in to my wifes windows PC. I never got around to installing it under windows on my computer because it would have taken my 15-20 minutes, and it was faster to go three steps to her computer and print.. but I had read that 7.10 had better printer support. I clicked the printers button-> add new printer-> It scanned for about 15 seconds (during which I thought "Yeah, right like it will find it"), it found it, discovered the that it was an hp 5850, set up the driver, and within 30 seconds and three mouse clicks I had installed a working printer and printed a test page. -Never- has it been that easy in windows. Never. Even if it was as simple as pop the disk in, it would take half an hour for a modern HP printer to install.
I have Gutsy installed on a thinkpad T42 with no issues for wireless
I've had no troubles with Gutsy - all worked fine on two laptops and a PC, all running with different wireless cards.
