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




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