8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[Grant Edwards]

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