Problems w/ wireless connection after installing updates

[Nate]

Generally speaking, running *updates* should not cause problems.  When an
upgrade on an Ubuntu system (excluding alpha and beta versions) causes a
regression, it's considered a huge problem, which is why updates to stable
versions are almost always limited to security patches or very trusted
version updates with minor changes which fix major problems in the stable
release.

Problems when running *upgrades* are much more common as a lot of things can
change release to release.  Hopefully, any problems someone might have when
upgrading have already been noted in the Release Notes, unless no one
noticed/reported the problem in the beta.


George, did you purchase the system from Dell with Ubuntu Preloaded?  What
is the model of the computer?  And did you do an update or an upgrade to a
new version?  Do you know what version of Ubuntu you are currently running
on the computer with wireless problems?  If you don't know what version you
are running you can check the System tab in the System Monitor (open the
System Monitor by pressing Alt+F2 and typing gnome-system-monitor in the
box, and click Run).  If you bought the system with Ubuntu already on it,
you are probably running Ubuntu 8.04.  Have you had any success getting this
working yet?  Let us know.


Alan, I'm sorry you've had so many issues upgrading.  It's unfortunet the
upgrade process didn't go better for you.  I usually upgrade my primary
Ubuntu system during late alpha (after testing my hardware against the
LiveCD, of course!) for testing and then run a full reinstall after final
release, as sometimes pre-release systems have various bits of oddness left
over.  My two other systems are all upgraded, release to release, and I
usually don't experience major issues (at least not unexpected ones).

Keeping your entire system intact and buying a new harddrive is certainly a
guaranteed way of making sure you aren't left out in the cold, but I don't
think that most users need to go to this much effort to keep their system
functional.  Keeping the old system on a seperate partition is an
interesting suggestion and could be a good move if you expect issues and and
if you have the space.

If you don't want to upgrade directly, another option would be to keep your
home folder on a seperate partition so that when you do your fresh install,
all your data (pictures, music, save games) and user settings persist.
Generally the stuff that is not in /home can just be reinstalled to get your
old system back if you need to.  (There are ways to automate the
reinstallation of the software you had installed in the old system via
Synaptic or the command line if you go this route).

Of course, there are a lot of Ubuntu people who don't upgrade.  I think most
of the fear comes from horrible past experiences running Windows upgrades.
Also, upgrading highly customized Ubuntu systems would be more likely to be
problematic.

I personally want the Ubuntu upgrade process to be flawless which is why I
choose to upgrade so that I can report any bugs I encounter.  Upgrading to
the beta version is probably the most helpful, as there is still time to fix
issues.  I'd encourage others to do the same if they are into reporting bugs
and making the upgrade process work better, so that users who just want it
to work have a good experience.

As for your video issues, YouTube will work if you install the
flashplugin-installer package with Synaptic or type "sudo apt-get install
flashplugin-installer" on the command line.  If he is attempting to watch
unsupported video formats in Totem, you should be prompted to install the
appropriate codecs, so that shouldn't be an issue for you.

Nate

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 1:30 PM, John Alan Hastings <jah1066 at aol.com> wrote:

> We have several Dell Ubuntu preloads, and we have had similar, though
> not identical, problems.  My son has had a Dell Inspiron 1420 with
> Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty) for several years.  At first, we did regular
> updates and the plan was to keep the machine up to date.  We did,
> hpwever, make the mistake of trying to upgrade to Gutsy, and that was a
> disaster.  It kind of trashed the system.  We had to reload from the
> manufacturer's reload partition--you know, the one that warns you that
> all data on your hard disk will be lost--which it will be.
>
> In retrospect, I would not upgrade again.  As a matter of fact, I
> haven't.  You can continue to install update and keep your system up to
> date without upgrading.  If you do decide to upgrade, do it by a fresh
> install from CD/DVD.  When you are at the point in the install where you
> are doing the partitioning of the disk, do a custom partition (do NOT
> use the whole disk) and resize but keep your old system and put your new
> system in a new partition.  The old one will be kept and it will be one
> of the options in the grub boot menu.  You will be able to boot from
> either.
>
> Anyway, my son was now gunshy and stopped even doing updates, and now,
> about two years later, he was beginning to be unable to watch videos and
> stuff.  Nothing was badly broken, but there were petty annoyances aplenty,
>
> We decided not to try to upgrade the old system.  We put the Ubuntu 9.04
> (Jaunty) live disc in the machine and booted it up.  Everything seemed
> to work, and so off we went to Best Buy.
>
> We bought a new 500 GB hard drive.  This is probably overkill; there was
> still room on the old drive and we could have gone the install and
> partition route, but the lure of taking a half a terabyte off to school
> was, well, alluring.  (Actually, it was kind of neat just talking in
> terabyte territory).
>
> We also bought a Rocketfish.  This is a case in which you can mount an
> old hard drive and attach it to your computer using USB.  We put the new
> hard drive in the computer and the old in the Rocketfish.  We then
> installed Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty).  It was a clean install and everything
> seems to work: wireless, audio, etc.  There are the usual problems with
> video codecs (more on that in a moment).
>
> We plugged the Rocketfish into a USB port and in a moment, it
> automounted.  We copied the /home directory tree in its entirely (use cp
> -dpR) and everything seems to be right where it needs to be.
>
> You can still boot the old system.  The old hard drive in the Rocketfish
> is a bootable USB device.  Plug it in and you can boot from it.  Our
> Dells give you a boot device choice if you hit F12 early in the boot
> process.  The old hard drive is now insurance.  It can be booted
> externally, and if necessary, it could always be put back in the
> machine, although I doubt that it will ever be necessary.
>
> Now then, the matter of videos.  Sigh.  This is the world of proprietary
> nonsense.  There are the proprietary codecs; there is DeCSS; there is
> the Adobe Flash player and probably half a dozen other issues.  Within
> Linux there is the Xine/Gstreamer issue.  I have promised my son he will
> be watching videos and youtube before the week is out.  I know it is
> possible, because I have done it with other machines.  The only problem
> is that I am not sure exactly what I did.  I am researching this issue
> at this very moment.  In fact, I am going to raise this issue in another
> post and get some community input.  Stay tuned.  I am watching videos on
> my own machine, so I know it is possible.
>
> Alan
>
>
> George Sgouros wrote:
> > My daughter has a Dell laptop running Ubuntu.  She was having problems
> viewing youtube videos and I thought that an Ubuntu update might help.  I
> went ahead and selected update (about 300 some updates were pending - I
> bought the laptop last Christmas!).  After the updates, the wireless network
> stopped working.  I connected by wire and that work, the dialogue for
> network.manager is different from the one her twin sister has (which I did
> not update).  Am I dealing w/ a bug?  The menu I get when I try and bring up
> network.manager does not look like the one on the other laptop.  The sequnce
> to get to network manager also seems different: System, adminitsration,
> network manager (rather than just network).
> >
> > Any support to get this to work would be much appreciated.  I've gone
> through all the Ubuntu sites and they seem to be geared for a higher level
> of expertise than what I have (It's been a long time since I used UNIX...
> and even then, I was just a user).
> >
> > Thanks.
> >
> > -GS
> > Ellicott City
>
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