Think twice upgrading to Edgy if using Wireless?
Thursday, October 26th, 2006I’ve been running Ubuntu Linux for some time now. It’s great for a development environment if you can’t afford one of those shiny MacBook Pros. I’ve had one BSOD on my Dell box this week - I’ve never had a crash in the past 5 months running Ubuntu.
The thing that put me off Linux in the past was the support for wireless. I can understand why it’s difficult to support such a thing with different chipsets and firmware. It seems in Ubuntu 6.06, this problem went away. I was running a WMP54G v4.1 card (the one with the Ralink RT2561/RT61 chipset) with no problems using a native driver. However, when I went to test Edgy (6.10), my card was no longer recognized and it tried to force me to use ndiswrapper - this doesn’t seem to work using this particular version of the card.
After reading some threads on the Ubuntu forums, it appears that I’m not alone and it bought to light something I didn’t know. Dapper (6.06) appears to be the stable release, Edgy (6.10) is more of a bleeding ‘edge’ release that contains lots of software that may be in a ‘beta’ state.
I’m going to roll back to using Dapper this weekend and leave Edgy alone for a while. I can live with a slightly slower boot up time for now.
