Truth be told I was baffled by how poor a job Canonical did on Karmic, and this is just one of the bazillion issues that you might encounter, so keep an eye out for others. After much head-scratching and Googling around for answers, I’ve finally managed to setup Karmic to work properly on a regular desktop after a fresh install. The problem, as reported many times on the Ubuntu Forums, is largely based on the fact that the network settings on Karmic were horrible to begin with. At least for Australia. The steps below are absolutely essential before you begin doing anything silly and risk destroying your Karmic installation.
Unless your DNS supports IPv6, chances are you will not be able to do anything that concerns the Internet, such as browsing, IMs, apt-get, or even Software Center. Without these Karmic is pretty much a crippled OS. You need to disable IPv6 in favour of the old IPv4 protocol. To do this, open up /etc/sysctl.conf in your favourite text editor and append this line to the end of the file:
net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6 = 1
This will disable IPv6 on all applications that you have, such as Pidgin (if you decide to hate Empathy and revert to old Pidgin), Skype, and weather forecasts.
This leaves only the settings on Firefox. Type “about:config” in the address bar, promise that you’ll be careful when prompted, and find a field that says:
network.dns.disableIPv6
and set it to true (you can double click on it).
The steps above will make your applications use IPv4. The last step in configuring the network is to set your machine to use OpenDNS nameservers. Follow the well-documented instructions on the Ubuntu Forums.
Despite these settings, however, I’ve run into trouble trying to download applications from the default Australian server. If this applies to you, you’ll need to configure Software Sources to download from the server that you can download from. Go to System > Administration > Software Sources and on the first tab where it says “Download from:”, select “Other…” and click “Select Best Server”. This will administer a bulkload of tests on all servers that you can reach and find the fastest one that you can download from. Select the server once the tests are done.
And that’s it! Hopefully with these, you will have a uber-fast, Internet-friendly Karmic OS to boot! There might be other things you’ll need to sort out, such as webcam capabilities and enabling Alt+Shift+Tab for windows navigation, but I’ll leave it to you to figure it out.
Interestingly I had similar issues that were fixed by the OpenDNS settings. That was the first install.
I had several other self imposed problems and ended up reinstalling. This time I didn’t have the network problem–magically.
I didn’t learn my lesson the first time and had a couple more reinstalls and each time I didn’t have to fix anything. Each time I reformatted the drives to make sure nothing stayed behind.
I don’t know if that all applies to your issue and I don’t know why I didn’t have the network issue after each reinstall–I used the same CD each time. Still it might be worth a try.
Well, I’m not sure you actually managed to debunk it, in fact you just demonstrated that the ‘fail’ exists.
Now, can someone debunk the ‘fail’ which exists for 3g usb mobile broadband users ? Not that it’ll be much use to them, since as they don’t have networking in the first place they won’t be able to read the debunk, or find any fix, etc.
It unfair to call Karmic a crippled OS. I have installed it on no less than 3 laptops and 4 desktops with no problem at all. It worked perfectly for me.
Karmic is very powerful once you get it working, but if you can’t access the internet with it then it’s very discouraging (the use of the ‘crippled’ word might be too harsh in this case).
Also in my case, it never seemed to recognise any external hard drive that is not mounted on boot. So if you plug your external drive in while you’re running Karmic, it won’t recognise me. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me. I have an NTFS-formatted Seagate 320GB.
my recommendation for the problem with your external harddrive, just simply install ntfs-3g, and it will mount your hdd automatically. And one more thing to do, try to cleanup your external hdd in windows, this will do the thing that should be done.