Posted inExperience / Information Technology / Thank You Sir May I Have Another

Ubuntu F’ed Networking Again!

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek0
Ubuntu logo

I’ve lost count of the number of times Ubuntu F’ed Networking over the course of my career. Was that the 2008 edition when the ISO ran great, it installed, and after it installed updates, all wifi using Broadcom chips ceased to work? It was great! They were used in something like 80+% of all laptops and I don’t know how many of those USB Wifi dongles.

Ubuntu just can’t be used for anything that matters.

I know it is one of the most popular distros, but they don’t take it seriously enough to be trusted. They constantly want you to pay them money, but they don’t do anything worthy of money.

Agile is Not Software Engineering

Agile is just hacking on the fly until the money runs out. It is not software engineering. You cannot do large scale software looking no more than six inches in front of your shoes (User Story) and expect valid architectural design to somehow shit itself out into your project. Won’t happen. Not in this or any other lifetime.

TDD is not software engineering. If you wish to kill patients wholesale, it’s what you use. People with ethics won’t touch it.

There is no amount of testing using Jenkins or GitHub test running facilities that qualifies as actual testing, period. You have to test on hardware! This is true for all operating systems and every medical device.

Ubuntu 24.04

I set this up the other day so I could spin up a Samba Share on a spare machine. It’s an i7-gen6 HP EliteDesk that had been running CachyOS until CachyOS broke. Pushing out untested updates is not how you win a fan base! If you didn’t test on hardware, you didn’t test.

Ubuntu F’ed networking again because 24.04 didn’t test on hardware. Normally they royally pooch wifi. This time they pooched wired networking. I had this running for a couple of weeks. Did updates and backups near end of this past week, noticed the little network indicator had a question mark. Stuck in a wifi dongle. Searched for every supposed fix and tried them.

How to fix?

I installed Debian 13.

If I didn’t also want to run BOINC I would have installed PCLinuxOS. They don’t have a native BOINC package and the flatpak version of BOINC isn’t so good. Well, if you don’t have any NVidia involved it mostly works. I have donated money to this project. There user forum is the friendliest you will ever encounter. Far nicer than the “We are God’s, you will use what we provide how we tell you to” attitudes you find on Ubuntu and Arch forums.

I also recommend MX Linux. I have it running on one machine where I’m writing the sequel to this novel along with doing some Open-Source development. It is rock solid. I think I’ve also sent money to this distro in the past year or two. Been a while, but I remember donating to Debian in the past too.

Why did I donate to these and not Canonical? Other than asking to donations on their websites, they didn’t *^(*&^ing nag me to “upgrade to Pro” or pay them money. Heck, I’ve donated to BetterBird. They only nag you once per year. First thing I do, even on a BOINC machine, is un-install Thunderbird.

Summary

Canonical, and therefore Ubuntu, has a looooong history of not testing on hardware. For a Linux distro that launched with a “Just works” marketing campaign all those years ago, they certainly haven’t adhered to that.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.

Leave a Reply