David's Computer Stuff Journal

Ubuntu Intrepid Regression: Beware of Wireless and WPA

Posted by David N. Welton Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:26:00 GMT

A lot of people, myself included as of the upgrade I did last night, seem to be having trouble using certain wireless chipsets with WPA:

https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/wpasupplicant/+bug/272185

There are a lot of people following this one, and you have to think that for every person who looked it up, googled it, and dug around to find that page, registered with the site, and so on, there are several more who simply gave up and went back to Windows or something.

I thought a couple of weeks was probably a good amount of time for the bugs to be shaken out of Intrepid, but I thought wrong.

Here is a set of search terms that can be used to look through "regression-potential" bugs, which if I'm not mistaken, ought to mean those things that worked in previous versions of Ubuntu but now no longer work. In my case, there's an extra little bit of annoyance because I am running on a Dell laptop that I bought with Ubuntu preinstalled, and you'd think the Ubuntu guys would have a few sitting around to do some testing with prior to release.

I spent some time digging around in the code for the network manager, wpasupplicant, and a brief look at the kernel code, but there was nothing that made much sense, so I guess I'll just have to wait for the fix like everyone else... wish I could help, somehow, though.

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  1. foo
    about 6 hours later:

    Does Debian lenny work? You might want to switch to that.

  2. David Welton
    about 12 hours later:

    I prefer Ubuntu's scheduled release cycles. They certainly have some problems, but overall, I think it's a better strategy, especially if they start to expend a bit more effort testing the thing.

  3. bar
    about 13 hours later:

    I have the same problem on lenny, so no chance

  4. john
    1 day later:

    I could be wrong here, but it appears that most of the various wifi problems and annoyances in Ubuntu probably stem from the new kernel and its new versions of the drivers. So this is probably going to spread beyond Ubuntu.

    Let's hope the FLOSS community gets this nailed down soon, and in the meantime, I suggest that those that haven't yet updated continue on with Hardy for the time being.

  5. Alan Pope
    1 day later:

    I had the same issue until I switched from network manager to wicd, now I have no wifi issues.

  6. Alan Pope
    1 day later:

    Bah, your page didn't update so I hit submit multiple times.

  7. Jason
    3 days later:

    And there's more regressions that your search terms haven't picked-up. For example, my inbuilt webcam (ASUS F3 series laptop) worked fine with Hardy, via stk11xx module. Under Intrepid, with the kernel change to stkwebcam module, it no longer works. Same problem for anyone (various different laptop makers) with the same (or very similar) webcam lsusb identifier (and thus same make/model from OEM).

    Intrepid has, IMHO, been a backward step for the Ubuntu team. Too many leaps forward, with too many regressions issues not corrected. And not enough positives to justify going ahead with so many regressions.