XUbuntu 9.10 – Disappointing

The project was to convert a Micron Transport ZX laptop with 256 meg. of memory into an Internet Gateway. On the Internet side is a USB modem, and the Lan side is a Belkin Wireless card with the dreaded BCM43xx chipset. I only had an XUbuntu 8.10 CD, so I installed with no problems. Network Manager recognized the USB Modem without a problem, so I was able to download the Window Wireless Driver program, installed the Windows driver, and used NDISwrapp Then I decided to upgrade to 9,04, and it was easy. The next hop was to version 9.10. The upgrade went without problems, but 9.10 is not the greated version of Ubuntu.Network Manager recognized the wireless card every time, but usually ignored the mobile broadband card. Every time I tried to edit the connection, I would get an authorization failure. All othe other application used the new authorization manager without a problem. After hours of going through bug reports, I found that it would work from the command line with the command: sudo nm-connection-edit.  Still, Network Manager didn’t want to play IP forwarding, or reliably start both interfaces. The only solution was to get rid of Network Manager and use wicd and wvdial in its place.

I wanted to manage the services that were running. No GUI Services Manager and no services-admin command was a big surprise. After checking the repositories, it was back to searching comments in the forums. Ubuntu changed to Upstart, which now splits between files in the /etc/init directory and the traditional SysV startup directories. However, there were no new applications, either GUI or command-line, to manage this new structure.

The default firewall is UFW, which has IP forwarding configuration, but it does not support NAT. Without NAT, the mobile broadband modem disconnects when it gets a non-routable IP address. This is where I had to spend serious time with Upstart to learn that sudo ufw disable would stop the firewall and not start it on the next boot. I switched to Firestarter.  I was having problems with Firestarter, until I found an article on how to get it to quite blocking DHCP packets from the LAN.

All this, and more, is documented in a post I made ot Ubuntu Forums.  It has been a long time since I battled so many problems to solve a simple problem. Ubuntu may be making a distro that is “easy” for newbies, but they are also making it less flexible and harder to manage.