The Path to Zen

Ubuntu Network Manager - Feisty… Fowl-up?

I couldn’t wait until the Feisty release, and upgraded to the beta a couple of weeks before the release date. Everything else went through quite well, except for the new Network Manager.

My network card has its own certain eccentricity that requires a little special setting before running. Somehow that doesn’t get along with the Network Manager, which insists on starting off the whole networking business by turning off the card first. In the beginning I thought this was because of the beta, and I just had to wait until the release and there’d be some sort of “patch”. Alas, three days past the golden date, I suddenly realized there weren’t any cavalries coming over the top of the hill . In the end, I had to completely uninstall the Network Manager, and go back to the good old ifup/ifdown rc scripts.

I wouldn’t have written this to whine about the NM if that were the only incident. As I’m getting myself quite comfortable with Ubuntu, I decided to completely switch another older computer from XP to Ubuntu. I tried Debian Etch first, but the repositories proved to be too far behind - even the testing. So I went ahead and installed Feisty, only to find that the Network Manager seemed to have determined to play some game with me around every corner.

The problem with this second computer is that it’s got a dlink wireless card that’s no longer used (ever since I moved it to close to the router enough for a wired connection). The NM insists on hooking up both wired and wireless networks. Even after I completely commented out the wireless interface in /etc/network/interfaces, it still somehow managed to figure out there is a wireless interface to work with. Not that I didn’t appreciate it trying to do its job, but it really got to the point of being over-zealous, if you ask me. So again I had to uninstall the NM, and stick to the good old networking scripts.