Ubuntu disappointment and data disasters

Tuesday, November 4th, 2008

Ubuntu 8.10 made its appearence this week, and while everybody was busy touting the network manager’s new-fangled ability to handle mobile broadband connections, what nobody seemed to be mentioning was that it doesn’t actually work very well.

The networking manager is brilliant. It’s a nice clean interface that shows you all the internet connections on your computer, whether that’s Wi-Fi, mobile broadband or any other. It works fantastically well for Wi-Fi, putting Vista’s overly fiddly version in the shade. 

Mobile broadband is an entirely different matter, though. We have three USB dongles in the office – hangovers from our mobile broadband comparison feature. Of the three, Ubuntu refused to recognise the O2 dongle even existed, and while it acknowledged the BT dongle, it had absolutely no idea what to do with it. In fact, lucky number 3 was the only one that worked, but it worked beautifully. We just plugged it in, selected the 3 option and off we went. No need to install software or drivers of any sort. Great stuff, but country to popular opinion, one out of three is actually bad. (more…)