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190 Comments
- MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -25/+87Uh. The problem is he may be right. I personally haven't used the new ubuntu one yet, but Microsoft _completely_ rewrote the way wireless networks are handled. The network center and the way wireless connections are done is quite nice to use.
- gcnaddict, on 10/12/2007, -36/+90"What kind of crack are you smoking? "
He's smoking something which at least lets him keep an eye on reality. Vista's wireless networking features (networking in general, for that matter) really are a dream to use (like Mio said). With that in mind, I advise you guys to stop digging him down. - cliffzdude, on 10/12/2007, -21/+677of7 speaks truth. There are two parts of wireless networking, first is driver support. Digg this down all you want, it won't change the fact that its still often a be-atch in any Linux distro. Secondly, comes how the desktop and/or additional network managers work. This looks simple, nice. But so is Windows. I fail to see how the ability to connect to a wireless network as easily as XP makes it better than XP, or better than Vista.
Really folks, take off the .nix rose colored glasses. Mind you I eat Linux ~and~ Windows professionally, and personally. I use and administer both at home, and more importantly at work. I love both, thank God for alternatives. But to be a fanboy of any particular OS is disingenuous to what computing is really about. Give me a cool OS and a hot box and a quiet evening, and I'm in heaven. ***** this fanboy *****. - CLucas916, on 10/12/2007, -3/+45For gods sake, im sick of people making it seem like certain apps only work with ubuntu. KNetworkManager is a KDE application, it will run on any distribution that is running KDE.
- FarcicalFart, on 10/12/2007, -2/+42I don't use KDE, but this is very similar to the gnome version which is in the new version of ubuntu, Fiesty Fawn.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/
It's also in Fedora, it is awsome. - schestowitz, on 10/12/2007, -46/+85@ 7of7
Please leave the UNIX/Linux section. You do nothing but trolling here, by definition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_troll
"In Internet terminology, a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, often in the form of posting messages that are inflammatory, insulting, incorrect, inaccurate, or off-topic, with the intent of provoking a reaction from others." - soogy, on 10/12/2007, -21/+60He's a troll because you disagree with his opinion? He made a very valid argument, pointing out the fact that Linux has just NOW begun to catch up with wireless. Especially when it comes to ease of use and friendliness, Vista is leaps and bounds ahead of Linux for networking in general.
Take, for example, how much more complicated a network bridge is to create in Linux than Windows. It's a matter of right clicking and choosing "bridge" in Windows.
@dsignr
Wireless on Linux has been notoriously difficult to use in the past; not so much for the Linux-savvy, just the average user. In fact, most Linux features in any given distribution are at least slightly more complicated than their OS X or Windows counterparts. - dsignr, on 10/12/2007, -7/+39I've been thinking of switching to Linux (by way of Ubuntu) for the past few months now. I'm an Apple/Windows user, and thought that Linux would be another good route to go. This article (judging by the title) would have sold me if it weren't for one big gap--how is it better than Windows? The title states "Ubuntu and wireless - now better than Windows!" Are they just talking about the UI? Does Ubuntu utilize the network card BETTER than Windows? It's unclear to me and I'm hoping someone could explain.
DISCLAIMER: This is a genuine inquiry and not another troll. - motang, on 10/12/2007, -5/+27Well networking is a key now a days, and it's good to see that it is being constantly improved in my favorite distro.
- eddyc, on 10/12/2007, -8/+29Driver support is still pretty useless, one of the only reasons I keep xp on the laptop. Its getting better everyday I know, but I think the headline is going a bit far
- sishgupta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+22Yeah its pretty annoying. Its very similar to the mac users going oooh mac osx easter egg in PYTHON!
- saleens281, on 10/26/2007, -11/+29we're going on year 3 with no native support for my broadcom chipset, and no wpa support with their hackjob "wpa-supplicant". *Better than windows* is a farse, having a pretty gui doesn't solve the driver issue.
- JeffH, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17That's what I was going to mention. The applet may be great, that's cool and all, but that's only if you're one of the lucky ones who gets your wireless card to work in the first place.
- D3koy, on 10/26/2007, -10/+25Better than Windows? no
It's not better than Windows until I can plug in my Linksys Adapter and have it auto install drivers and then let me pick what network I want to connect to...quickly, and without code
For now Windows still has the upper hand, but only because Linux is a lesser used OS and companies don't make their devices work out of the box... - ibis, on 10/12/2007, -0/+13It absolutely does matter that it's the manufacturers fault. There are many, many wireless cards that are supported perfectly under linux. If you just want to complain, then go ahead, but if you want to fix things, vote with your wallet and buy a supported card.
- dougbarrett, on 10/12/2007, -4/+17Sure setting up wireless for your home network is easy, but he doesn't tell you about the time you spend setting it up with the modprobe & ndiswrapper.
Dugg down, by a Linux user. - Baddox, on 10/12/2007, -7/+19@ Ag3ntOrang3:
It's not sad. When you're the only one in a 10 sq. mile radius that's every even INSTALLED Linux, much less would have the slightest clue how to crack a WEP key, adding a simple WEP key that's easy for your friends to remember and key in is by FAR the most security you'll ever need on your WAP. Especially when you're using a $30 DLINK WAP that doesn't even reach to the road. Don't try to sound smart by commenting that WEP is so dangerous to use now. Lock picks have been around as long as locks have, yet people still put them on important things (like houses)...this is because hardly anyone knows how to or would pick your lock. - MioTheGreat, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14"Unfortunately, "Vista" is so badly broken that there is no way it'll ever become a mainstream operating system."
Oh give me a break. In around a month its market share will already match Linux and OSX combined. - lokoluis15, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13Though I dislike trolling in general, when the title is:
Ubuntu and wireless - now better than Windows!
you can't blame him for defending windows, a reaction prompted for by those who merely disagree with the topic. Thus I don't think his statement is provoking or off-topic - the title was kind of asking for it. - jon314, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12This is what I don't understand about the article. The problem with Linux and wireless is the driver support, not some gui thing...
(I'm typing this from a laptop running Zenwalk with working wireless, by the way. But I have had problems with wireless before.)
That said, ndiswrapper is a bit of a minor miracle. =)
Good stuff. - Mesach, on 10/12/2007, -4/+13I'd ditch XP, if it supported my Belkin N1 Desktop card, but it seems that Wireless N has yet to really be adopted in the linux driver realm
- javaroast, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10Buried as inaccurate. 1.) This has absolutely nothing to do with Ubuntu. 2.) This is a graphic frontend for Network Manager not a revolutionary new piece that addresses some of the real issues with linux wireless namely the drivers. I use linux every day professionally and personally, but I am so tired of the misleading headlines and rampant fan-boyism on both sides of the fence here.
- sishgupta, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11NetworkManager for Gnome is amazing imho. Very simple wireless networking that does wpa2 and just works.
- Sentinel, on 10/26/2007, -1/+10I spent probably 3 hours this weekend with the latest version of Kubuntu and Knetworkmanager trying to connect to my wireless network on my laptop. I'm not sure if it is my hardware or Linux itself, but I was never able to get it working. I was very excited about trying Linux on my laptop, but I had to go back to Windows. Sorry Linux, but I need my wireless!
- soogy, on 10/12/2007, -7/+15@mictester
Oh my, you are ABSOLUTELY CORRECT! Due to all of its flaws, Vista will never be a mainstream operating system.
...Unless they offer free upgrades for many older models.
...And prepackage it with almost every new computer. - karamba_kid, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Linux has been in your wireless linksys AP holding the DHCP server and NAT down. duh..
- n0xie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8If wireless chipset vendors would release Linux drivers, it wouldn't be that much of a problem. Reverse engineering drivers takes time. People always say it's hard or inpractical to do under Linux. That's hardly Linux's fault. If the vendors would support Linux it would be just as easy, probably easier as it is under Windows.
- whirlwind12, on 10/12/2007, -4/+11Just because the manufacturer doesn't supply a driver for Linux doesn't make the Linux wireless network management tool not better than windows. All it means is that Windows still has the majority of users, which is by far true.
- paxmaniac, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7It's precisely the many versions of Linux that is it's strength over proprietary OSes like Windows and Mac.
It is not "watering down" Linux to have many distributions - exactly the opposite in fact. If you subsumed all the versions of Linux into a single distro, you simply cannot meet everybody's needs. Are you a Linux newbie that wants everything in a simple GUI form with all of the potential customisation hidden away? Are you a developer that wants advanced UIs with every option under the sun? Do you need a real time kernel for embedded applications? Do you want to run it from a CD, a DVD, a USB stick, or a 250GB drive? Do you want educational tools, enterprise tools, programming tools, entertainment tools? - sanguinemoon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7"Are you also sick of people saying "Coke" instead of cola?"
As a matter of fact, I am! If it very correct to point out that this applet is part of KDE and has nothing to do with Ubuntu. - clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9right, poor hardware support is the mfgrs fault. They will come around, slowly but surely.
- captjc, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8@wabbiteh
Gnome apps run in KDE. KDE apps run in gnome as well. - clickwir, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7What appears on the surface to be broad and spread out, is actually the driving force behind the biggest free and open movement putting pressure on mfgrs they have ever seen.
By being broad and spread out, the distros are able to encompass more people, thus making their one message even stronger.
Windows does thing with a top down approach, and it worked for several years. Linux works in the opposite way.
If you really tried them, most distros are the same thing for 90% of it and they customize maybe 10%. So the big ones, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Suse, Mandivia, etc already ARE a merging of the best. Package management and UI are the 2 biggest differences. Other than that, they are, for the most part, all the same. - killerofkiller, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9KNetwork manager has WPA support and it's great....
- martypal2005, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6OK. Does it support broadcom adapter. Yes or no? If not it is useless!
- saftaplan, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6@Hydraulix: I thought this was obvious, but GUIs allow you to do something without the need to know a command like iwlist. People like you are the reason why people keep nagging that Linux isn't user-friendly, while it certainly is imho.
- jon314, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Don't worry about the command line for now if it's too intimidating. Ubuntu has that nice Add/Remove Software thing in their menu. Give that a try. If you want even more options, fire up Synaptic under "Administration". For even more software (!) click on "Repositories" somewhere in the menus at the top (sorry, can't remember where exactly) and enable the checkboxes beside the Universe and Multiverse repositories. This will make available to you a whole load of packages. Look through them for what you need using the search utility and install stuff to your heart's content. You might find something you like. And you never have to go anywhere near the command line. You'll probably use it all the time once you get more used to Linux and learn the power of the CLI =)
- damentz, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6True, nearly every large distribution has it, and by large I mean a distro with a large community.
- Ag3ntOrang3, on 10/12/2007, -9/+14@UNL1M1T3D
"What kind of crack are you smoking? When I installed Ubuntu my wireless card was already installed and ready to go. All I had to do was put in my SSID and WEP key."
Are you seriously still using WEP? That's pretty sad.
I play with Linux once a year to see where it is at and I recently played with Ubuntu 6.06 I believe and I had to go find a tutorial on how to get my wireless working because I could not connect to my WPA encrypted network. XP has had better out of the box support than Linux in my limited exposure to Linux. Glad to see that is changing, but the title of this article is just stupid. Stop comparing it to Windows and saying it is better, it's all about preference. Title should be, Ubuntu, making wireless networking more user friendly for Linux users. That would make me download the beta, bashing Windows shows your fanboyism. - n0xie, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12Nothing installs without typing in commands? Have you ever looked at synaptec at all? You can say a lot about Ubuntu, but the way it installs software is the easiest thing in the world. Windows doesn't have anything that comes even close to apt-get/aptitude/synaptec (whichever you prefer). And it's all free. No weird shareware, no bundled spyware, no trial, no MS who decides what you can and can't use.
- mabhatter, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6well on the notebook I'm on right now it did exactly that. From inserting the install CD to wireless surfing was 20 minutes... and no downloading or terminal entry.
Granted, I hunted high and low for a Linux Supported card and then bought that! That made all the difference and worked perfectly right off the install disk. Heck my Dell Inspiron wireless works right off one of the Knoppix CDs! - coheedcollapse, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6Funniest thing I've figured out about Ubuntu recently is that I can get my ancient WUSB11 v4 working with WPA, which the original Linksys drivers don't support. So I'm able to connect to my wireless network at home on Ubuntu but not Windows. I mean it was not easy by any meants (ndiswrapper was a pain in the ass to me for a while), but it's still funny that it can be done.
Excited to try out this little program later when I get my real computer/wireless working again. (My main computer sort of blew up...charger problems). - cawpin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6KNetworkManager is just the KDE equivalent of NetworkManager on plain old Ubuntu. It is what I use on my laptop and it works great. The setup IS easier than Windows XP. I'm not sure about Vista because I haven't used wireless on it yet. The only remaining problem for Linux wireless is the hardware vendors that don't supply drivers or a way for the community to write drivers.
- gol706, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6While it's not "Linux's" fault, It's still more trouble that I have ever had the patience to deal with. And while vote with your wallet is a good ideal, the problem is that the built in wireless card in every laptop I've ever used has had a broadcom chipset. I just want my built in card to work without 5 hours of setup.
- bigtomrodney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4As mentioned this is the samp app - Network manager is the underlying infrastructure and Knetworkmanager/Gnome Network Manager are just frontends. The real problem I have with this article is that this is not Ubuntu software nor is it exclusive to Ubuntu. It was written by Red Hat and has been present by default in the last two releases of Fedora and openSUSE.
Anyone who's used Automatx in the past six months in Ubuntu will already have had it available as an option there, with it already being in the repositories beforehand. There's the real problem I see with new Linux users who started with Ubuntu - and I say this as a user of Ubuntu among other distros - they all seem to think the buck stops with Ubuntu. Because something was implemented in it doesn't mean they are the only ones to have had it. At this rate we might see kids calling the kernel Ubuntu too.
That said, I am not criticising Ubuntu itself as I think it is a great distro with probably the best community support out there, and some of the best repositories around. - neutrino15, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5OMG! Thank you so much for that app! I had no idea it existed and looks really nice! I will install this when my machine decides to work again!
p.s. iwconfig is also fine for me.. but then again... I do see how this kind of development will eventually being certain distros of linux down to the level of the common consumer! I REALLY can not wait for the day when a grandmother chooses Linux over Windows! It looks like this day may be fast approaching! - cg0def, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4forgive the uneducated question but isn't KWirelessNetwork part of KDE and not an addition from Ubuntu? If so how does this relate to Ubuntu?
- brundlefly76, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Why cant some Linux users just enjoy a great upgrade without insisting on making a completely unfounded hyperbolic claim about surpassing the usability of Windows?
I have Suse 10.2 running knetworkmanager with Intel3945ABG and it is excellent compared to previous Linux wifi management (which, lets face it - simply sucked much longer then it should have!) but it is not better then Windows, MacOS, or Intel ProSet/Wireless wifi management (the latter being the best IMHO).
1. It is relatively VERY slow to connect to a secure AP and especially reconnect compared to the others.
XP/Vista is already connected by the time I can start firefox, knetworkmanager is not.
Changing secure access points between 2 available is also curiously slow.
2. It doesn't hold connections as well as the others, even in the presence of a strong signal.
3. It occasionally will disappear on startup and when recovering from sleep or hibernation.
4. It cannot discern between different types of failure. WPA password wrong? dhcpclient not running? Its all 'failed to connect' as far as knetworkmanager is concerned, at which point you need to manually debug. However, on other platforms, if its just you your password is wrong it will simply ask you to re-enter it.
5. In order for it even to work even close to as well as Windows, on, say, Intel3954, the intel wireless driver, closed-source intel daemon and intel firmware, dhcpclient, knetworkmanager, wpa_supplicant, and kwallet all need to be installed and working correctly, and even then you have to type your password into kwallet on every startup to fetch wep/wpa keys. - lukas88, on 10/12/2007, -5/+9Here is my linux experience that took place a week ago:
I installed kubuntu on my laptop. Installation went smoothly and when it was over there were 3 problems: It wouldn't support the 1280x800 resolution of my display, the wireless only supported WEP encryption (which may be fixed with this update, who knows), and the standby/hibernate functions of my laptop would not work. After quite a bit of searching, I managed to fix the wireless and display problems. The standby/hibernate problem looked pretty unfixable, the general consensus of the support forums I visited seemed to be that linux just don't do so well in that area at the moment. I take this laptop to school and I need to open it up and start it up and close it and expect it to hibernate, all very fast. Linux, at the moment can't handle this.
So I went and installed XP again. As I got in to XP, I was faced with the very same problems that I had in linux! The only difference was, there was proprietary drivers for XP, and linux usually just has to fend for itself. Of course in windows I got it working correctly in a manner of minutes. But I realized that the faults that I had with linux were mostly a lack of support from the manufacturers.
From what I gather, this gradual change will never work, there needs to be a major upset in the realm of microsoft. Maybe the failure of vista will supply that, who knows. - gabrielsond, on 10/12/2007, -8/+12Are you also sick of people saying "Coke" instead of cola? It seems Ubuntu is the distro of choice lately, so it may be a fair comparison.
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