8.04 networking seems awfully broken.

[NoOp]

On 07/24/2008 06:52 PM, Grant Edwards wrote:
> On 2008-07-24, NoOp <glgxg at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>> On 07/24/2008 11:10 AM, Grant Edwards wrote:
>>> On 2008-07-24, Derek Broughton <news at pointerstop.ca> wrote:
>>>> Grant Edwards wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> I found recipes in forum postings.  Was the installer supposed
>>>>> to do something?
>>>>
>>>> No.  The "hardware drivers manager" does (jockey-kde in KDE and jockey-gtk
>>>> in Gnome), _after_ you start your desktop.
>>> 
>>> I didn't see anything.  After I noticed that wan0 wasn't
>>> associating no matter how many times I ran the network-manager,
>>> I started sifting through the sysmem log and found an error
>>> message from the bt43 driver saying that it couldn't find a
>>> firmware file.  After some googling through the forums, I found
>>> the recipe for download the firmware and the extractor and
>>> generating the required .fw files.
>>
>> Jockey should have found it, but do this from a terminal:
>>
>> sudo apt-get install --reinstall jockey-gtk
>> sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter
> 
> I had no working network connection.
> 

Then you shouldn't have been trying to install a linux distro on a
customer's computer to begin with. I'm not trying to be critical; but to
load any linux distro without some means to eventually connect isn't the
way to go IMO. That said, I quite often install machines via disk
without a network connection (it's my preferred method) and then later
connect to the network in order to download updates and/or 3rd party
drivers.

Obviously you _did_ eventually have some network connection in order to
load:

<quote>
 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.
</quote>

or did you load that tarball via some other means?

I also understand the frustration when a new install or an update
doesn't automagically include the private driver that I need to continue
to update/load... the archives here will attest to that. But it's pretty
much the same in the Windows world; I've performed upgrades from WinME
to Win2K to WinXPP and put in an ethernet nic so that the poor upgradee
could connect to DSL or cable, only to find out that Win didn't have the
nic drivers on their CD. I then would have to download via other means,
transfer to a floppy or CD and then update the nic drivers that way.

Computers sometimes aren't quite the 'appliances' that folks think the
are and sometimes you just have to take that into account. Bottom line
is (IMO) you shouldn't have been 'introducing' the customer's laptop to
Ubuntu/Gentoo/etc without having taken into account that the laptop's
wireless might not work out of the box.

Obviously it did have some network connection, and if not a simple $20
Airlink 101 USB to ethernet adaptor works just fine for a hardwired
connection. You might want to buy one of those just to have on hand;
mine has saved me several times when I had a bad nic or wireless card.
Also look into USB and/or PCMCIA wireless cards that are shown to work
out of the box with Ubuntu: I can't honestly give you the names of any
as they seem to change with every new update revision. Perhaps others on
this list can.