Ubuntu is a very nice linux distribution and I use it on most of my systems, desktop or server. Ubuntu is a Debian derivative. It could not exist if Debian was not there. Ubuntu is maintained by Canonical Ltd. Ubuntu has put great effort in making a operating system that can be installed and used on an end-user desktop by non-Geeks.
And this works great, if you don’t worry to much about installing all kind of stuff you don’t know and you maybe don’t need – like any ordinary MS-Windows user – installation is even more easy than than installing Windows.
However on some occasions the Ubuntu people have gone over the top. Below the most annoying things I found and how I solved it.
Network-manager
The network-manager enables people to configure WLAN-access from the desktop and I must admit, the GUI looks OK. The problem is network-manager also manages the resolver (with dnsmasq). This is much slower than a straight forward configuration. Firefox sometimes can not find a website due to the resolver being too slow.
Solution:
Remove network-manager
# apt-get remove network-manager dnsmasq-base
Configure the network interface in /etc/network/interfaces. For a wired connection add the lines
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp
For a wireless connection the WLAN-credentials are supplied by wpa-supplicant. /etc/network/interface should have:
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
/etc/wpa_supplicant.con should look like:
network={
ssid=”<AP-ssid>”
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk=”<pre-sharedkey>”
}
Failsafe timeouts
in /etc/init/failsave.conf several sleep commands are build in to make sure the network is up before the system boot continues. If you have a network configuration like above, with both eth0 and wlan0 defined as ‘auto’ in /etc/network/interfaces all time-outs will be touched delaying the boot-process by some minutes. IMHO opinion a useless waist of time. If either eth0 or wlan0 can connect to the network this will happen in a few seconds If both interfaces can not connect they will not do that if you wait for an hour too. Just minimize the timeouts
# vi /etc/init/failsafe.conf.
First sleep set to 2
Comment out the lines
$PLYMOUTH message –text=”Waiting for network configuration…” || :
sleep 40
$PLYMOUTH message –text=”Waiting up to 60 more seconds for network configuration…” || :
sleep 59
$PLYMOUTH message –text=”Booting system without full network configuration…” || :