As of this moment (this will change in the future), I would suggest some care in installing the new Ubuntu release, especially on newbie computers that depend on Mobile Internet. The shipped kernel has a bug with some USB dongles: It mounts the small SSD drive on the dongle, instead of making the modem available. This means that, when you connect the dongle there will be no Internet. If you are a geek, the problem is easy to correct, but for normal users (wasn’t one of the points of Ubuntu to make free software easily available to normal users?) it will be a bad experience.
Furthermore, after the problem above is corrected, many times is fails to get the DNS info on connection.
These are both old problems, that have been solved in the past and have re-emerged.
How serious is this? Most Vodafone dongles (Vodafone is a very big pan-European mobile operator) that I know off show this problem.
How Ubuntu Q&A let this one pass, let alone mark this bug as only of “medium” importance baffles me. The number of normal users that this has the potential to impact is substantially high.
Federico says:
Be honest: if you want to be serious with Linux your only option is getting a RHEL/CentOS (or SuSE).
November 1, 2009, 20:17