Using the latest Ubuntu Mate 20.10.
For about 95% I am happy. This is good since I've been using Linux since 1996 with a lot of good and poor distros. Ubuntu has pretty much been a stalwart of the system for most of this time.
One of my thoughts about the system bug reporting mechanism is that it doesn't work or at least doesn't appear to work.
The reason I say this is because both laptops I have it installed upon start with the same warning message that Ubuntu has had a system crash and do I want to send in the bug report.
This I have done many times and the message is still there after many installs of the system since 20.04 came about.
I wonder why these things are left hanging?
A second gripe rather than a thought is to do with poor follow up on fault reporting about install issues.
I have a seven year old Lenovo as one of my daily machines. At week one I dual booted the Windows install with Ultimate Edition Linux and Crunchbang Linux. Ultimate was starting to show development problems and was abandoned by me (shame) and apart from support for Crunchbang halting because the developers were departing, the system still worked without fault.
Now the thing is that both these systems recognised and worked with my Wireless card. Even before I bought the Lenovo operation of WiFi cards was becoming a standard part of every distro install but for some strange reason the Ubuntu developers have had difficulty getting to grips with sorting out the install image to incorporate the card for my machine into the final install.
Even today the Live Image I used to reinstall the system (20.10) on this seven year old laptop has the ability to employ 'Additional Drivers' app from the Menu and setup my WiFi card so that I can connect to the outside world before installing the system BUT it is absent from the actual system install.
I cannot use my WiFi card because for some strange reason the 'Additional Drivers' app shows no drivers after install. Not even an indication that it is searching... I have to hard wire with Ethernet and then use 'Additional Drivers' to sort this out.
If any of the devs are reading this surely it is something minor (on a presumably short list of minor things to be sorted out because the majority of users are happy as is). Why can't the 'Additional Drivers' app be fixed to work both at Live Desktop and Installation end?
The troublesome Lenovo is a Z50-70 model for info with a Broadcom WiFi card.
Oh, everything works fine on my two year old Lenovo laptop and my thirteen year old Dell.
Hi and thanks for your feedback.
- You can delete the logs from
/var/crashas root to get rid of those messages.
I assume they don't delete it automatically once the report is sent since you might want to check them yourselves. - As for your Wi-Fi problem, I guess the Broadcom drivers are on the Ubuntu ISO, should someone need them (otherwise I assume you wouldn't be able to connect to the internet - without ethernet - in order to download them) and since you did not tick the box, they're not present on your install and then you can't fetch them without internet (hence the ethernet requirement to do so). Some people don't want proprietary Broadcom drivers on their system, I guess that's the reason.
Thanks for your reply Utsuro. I have never seen an option to tick for installing WiFi drivers. It's just curious that the Live image has the option but the Desktop install does not. This is an odd situation as the WiFi cannot work until drivers are detected and they are not detected until the laptop is connected by Ethernet after installing the system but on the Live image they appear for selection. This is what I mean. It would appear that they have been missed on the Desktop build our something.
Please see - Broadcom wireless tip where this issue has a fix and other pages to explore if needed.
Tiring of rigging an ethernet cable, I acquired a wireless dongle from amazon that let me deal with this issue almost effortlessly.
That shouldn't be necessary though. If the WiFi will work in the live installation environment but not the installed desktop I'd consider that a papercut of significant order and even if you and I are able to deal with it (dongle from Amazon for you, Ethernet for me) it's poor usability from an enduser standpoint. Something which worked is now suddenly not working. It's broken.
This is one of those situations that should never happen, regardless if most users will be able to work around it.
I agree with you. This is broken.
Thanks Michael Dooley. The tip from the link you show is no doubt sound but from day 1 I found my own remedy. Connect an Ethernet cable to the router and then click 'Additional Drivers'. Select the Broadcom driver and watch the magic as all WiFi connections are suddenly found. Connecting is then straightforward.
In my post I was trying to point out that we should not have to use an Ethernet cable at all because we can connect using the Live Desktop but this process has not been transferred completely to the install and so my Broadcom card is not detected without the application of connecting to the internet.
I'm sorry if I come on strong about this. I didn't mean anything towards you personally.
I've been very frustrated by this type of catch-22 bug in the past though and all the more skilled users of that time seemed to find the predicament to be unfathomable. They would (probably intending to be helpful) give instructions such as plug in an Ethernet cable when I was without my own connection and was using the free WiFi offered at places like the Public Libraries or at coffee shops. Other people finally understanding the situation would try to help me to get the files needed offline and install from the terminal but in those days before smartphones even this advice wasn't always very useful and hard to access when needed.
I guess I still have strong feelings about this even a decade and a half later....
Bornagainpenguin, you're not alone. I have voiced my opinion about this 'carelessness' in the past and it has always fallen on deaf ears.
It is not good for new users wanting to come over to the other side, looking for something better.
They're part of the third-party software for graphics and Wi-Fi hardware and additional media formats option that you have to tick if you want to use some hardware that requires additional drivers.
It is just like the proprietary Nvidia display drivers that are nowadays on the ISO. Since I don't own a Nvidia card, I wouldn't like them to be installed on my system. Same goes for those Broadcom drivers.
You just have to know it is required for your hardware to tick it if you want to use this peculiar wi-fi module. While it might not be convenient to the few Ubuntu users running this chipset that did not tick the box, there are workarounds.
- Ethernet, as you mentioned,
- USB tethering with a phone connected to your wi-fi network or a mobile connection if you cannot do ethernet.
- Replacing the wireless module with one that does not cause such troubles.
- Restart the installer and then don't forget about ticking the box this time (takes a few minutes of your time).
@Utsuro, you're not seeing it from an enduser standpoint. All they understand is that this cool desktop alternative to Windows worked when they tested it and installed it but now that it's on the actual hardware it doesn't work anymore. It feels... sloppy. It makes someone question whether anything else might be broken that they can't see.
When they bring it up all they get are workarounds to fix what was previously working just fine. And they start to feel gaslit because no one seems to understand how broken it is to have something as basic as networking work in the installer but not in the installed system...
It's completely unprofessional. It doesn't matter how easy or not easy it is to fix. It shouldn't be happening.
Well, I disagree.
To me, there's nothing to fix about this, only to improve (eventually).
If you do things correctly (= tick the box) it works perfectly fine.
You tick the box, it installs what YOUR (not everyone's) computer needs.
In this forum, peole are depicted as being smart enough to download a distro, flash it on a flash drive and modify their boot sequence or use the boot menu in order to boot on it but still, they wouldn't be able to read the few lines that matter on the screen when installing it.
I don't see why they should force some useless (in most cases) proprietary software on everyone when a probably very low percentage of users require it. Nothing unprofessional about this.
It's like blaming the installer for not partitioning your drives the way you wanted because you selected «automatically» instead of «other» while installing.
An improvement to this situation would be mentioning during the install that this peculiar computer requires additional drivers for a piece of hardware that won't work if the box is not ticked.
OK, I see where we're having a fundamental disagreement on here. There are two things wrong with the situation as presented.
-
You're assuming that it is obvious to the user that they need to do something here. I always check the box by default because even though it makes the installation last longer I get everything installed that I need out of the box. To many people it is not necessarily obvious that ticking a box is what will make their hardware work when doing the install. 'Everything works right now so why do I need to do anything?' would be the manner of thought in such a situation.
-
You're assuming that ticking the box always does what it's supposed to do. There have been many times that I've groaned and reached for the spare Ethernet cord because despite having clicked on the box to install additional drivers, updates, etc I've rebooted at the end and discovered to my dismay that the drivers for whatever reason did not install and I have no WiFi. It is something that has happened more than a few times for me. This is a bug and one which I never really understood how to explain to people because fixing it was just a matter of grabbing the Ethernet and adding additional hardware support in the 'Additional Drivers' applet.
If everything works like it's supposed to then there's no issue here. Unfortunately everything does not always work like it's supposed to every time. That's what we're addressing.
You're assuming that it is obvious to the user that they need to do something here. I always check the box by default because even though it makes the installation last longer I get everything installed that I need out of the box. To many people it is not necessarily obvious that ticking a box is what will make their hardware work when doing the install. 'Everything works right now so why do I need to do anything?' would be the manner of thought in such a situation.
Not assuming this since I suggest to add something like «your computer wireless module is X. It's not supported with the default install and requires additional proprietary software. Make sure to install it if you want it to run as it should. »
You're assuming that ticking the box always does what it's supposed to do. There have been many times that I've groaned and reached for the spare Ethernet cord because despite having clicked on the box to install additional drivers, updates, etc I've rebooted at the end and discovered to my dismay that the drivers for whatever reason did not install and I have no WiFi. It is something that has happened more than a few times for me. This is a bug and one which I never really understood how to explain to people because fixing it was just a matter of grabbing the Ethernet and adding additional hardware support in the 'Additional Drivers' applet.
If your hardware worked as it should in a live session and not after install despite ticking the box, then yes, this is a bug.
If it did not work as designed in a live session and despite ticking the box, it wasn't working in the actual install, then the drivers might not be on the iso and another way (ethernet, usb tethering) is required after install to grab them from the internet. Not a bug.
I missed this the first time. I agree with this absolutely. This is exactly the kind of 'intuitive' message that should come up whenever the system detects that proprietary hardware is using a module in the live environment that will not be there unless the user enables the installation of extra modules and other software. It should be a 'Yes or No' question because it is possible some more advanced users will have some specific packages they prefer to use or some other use case.
I'm glad we can at least agree on this.
Totally agree bornagainpenguin.
Thanks for your thoughts Utsuru.
I have installed Ubuntu many times and at one time was an Admin tester. I am aware of ticking the box - thanks again.
By coincidence, I had to reinstall Ubuntu last night on one of my older laptops with the Broadcom card. The sequence for activating WiFi on the Live Desktop, for me anyway, is to get to the Desktop. Then go to Main Menu and choose Additional Drivers. The search begins and the drivers appear.
THIS IS THE CRUCIAL PART...
When I then continue to install the system proper and (I tick the box for third party, etc) all goes well and the system installs but at no time am I offered to connect to WiFi.
So I again choose Additional Drivers but this time no search takes place. Nothing 'appears' to happen with a search until I connect using Ethernet. A procedure may happen in the background that is too fast for me to notice and therefore looks like no search has taken place but I don't think so. It is frustrating that this procedure works on Live Desktop but not at system install.
Again, thank you for your insight.
@Deke55, thanks for reporting this. Does this happen each time or it is a hit-n-miss? I have a MBP with broadcom card so I can check.
I have Debian and UM 20.04 on it. On Debian for sure I have faced problem. I haven't tried non-free iso. On normal iso, I install, then using ethernet or USB tethering on installed system, enable non-free repo and then install the required drivers. However, I forgot what was the case with UM-20.04. Did I enable additional driver option during install or chrooted from Debian and installed drivers later, I honestly forgot.
Have you had issue with 20.04 or it was OK with 20.04 but an issue on 20.10?
Thanks for the input.
This happens every fresh install. It has been the same since I started using Ubuntu a couple of years ago with Mint. So this must go back to at least 18.04. Every install with this Lenovo Z50 and the Broadcom card has been the same. The network card is not detected or reported by the system until I connect with the Ethernet cable. The Additional Drivers app only then will do a search for drivers. The driver for the card is detected and everything goes well from there. Like I say, this step has been missed from the install since it was works with the Live image.
I have sent for a Realtek card to see what difference this will make. My Lenovo V330 uses a Realtek and has no install issue.