I recently helped a relative move an old Win XP machine to Ubuntu. I was going to move them to Lubuntu; however, the USB WiFi dongle they are using refused to cooperate -- or rather, the Lubuntu live disk I was testing refused to cooperate with it.
The dongle's chipset was Linux friendly and had apparently worked without major problems up to about Ubuntu 10.10 or so. Google revealed the eruption of numerous reports of problems at that time.
Problems that apparently persisted through several releases, for a good couple of years.
The solution that people found worked was to download driver source code from the chipset manufacturer (RA) and build it, with custom settings, on one's own machine. Some also found success with banning one or more apparently concurrently competing drivers from being loaded on their system. Per some descriptions, multiple compatible drivers would wrestle for control of the device, evincing symptoms matching what I'd experienced.
I was getting ready start a custom build and/or perhaps whacking driver loads -- after installing Lubuntu to get past the fixed Live CD configuration, when I thought to try the plain Ubuntu live disk as opposed to Lubuntu. Problem gone.
Working stuff breaks. Breaks persist for months if not years. Ostensibly compatible/comparable systems aren't.
I'm not going to complain; it is what we make of it. But still, today, we don't always do such a good job of making -- or maintaining.
Separately, the Ubuntu screen image on my relative's truly mass produced, 17" Dell LCD is shifted slightly to the right -- just enough to hide the rightmost few pixels. An old 17" LCD I have plugged into an old T42, has a similar shifting. Useable, but slightly annoying, particularly with respect to today's anorexic scroll bars.
I did a little research into the problem, months ago, but did not find a ready solution. Not WiFi, but still slightly to moderately awkward.
If it's a VGA monitor you probably need to hit the auto-adjust button on it. Different graphics cards and drivers produce slightly different timings for the same mode, so the monitor has to compensate, and it only adjusts its setting when you first get it or explicitly tell it to.
Thanks! I don't know about my relative's monitor, but the monitor attached to the T42 has a dedicated "Auto" button. I think I had waded through the separate menu choices without success, but I never tried that "Auto" button.
Pressing "Auto", the image futzed around for a few seconds and then apparently aligned properly. It didn't even mess up my brightness setting.
Sigh... I'm getting old.
I guess I'll add that for a long time, this monitor was dual boot, and I wasn't too interested at regaining the pixels in Ubuntu, only to lose them or their corresponding columns on the other side, under Windows. Nowadays, no longer a concern...
As I grumped in another comment, I'm getting old. One symptom of such is increasingly "putting up" with marginal cases. Starts becoming "easier" than finding/learning yet "one more thing".
The dongle's chipset was Linux friendly and had apparently worked without major problems up to about Ubuntu 10.10 or so. Google revealed the eruption of numerous reports of problems at that time.
Problems that apparently persisted through several releases, for a good couple of years.
The solution that people found worked was to download driver source code from the chipset manufacturer (RA) and build it, with custom settings, on one's own machine. Some also found success with banning one or more apparently concurrently competing drivers from being loaded on their system. Per some descriptions, multiple compatible drivers would wrestle for control of the device, evincing symptoms matching what I'd experienced.
I was getting ready start a custom build and/or perhaps whacking driver loads -- after installing Lubuntu to get past the fixed Live CD configuration, when I thought to try the plain Ubuntu live disk as opposed to Lubuntu. Problem gone.
Working stuff breaks. Breaks persist for months if not years. Ostensibly compatible/comparable systems aren't.
I'm not going to complain; it is what we make of it. But still, today, we don't always do such a good job of making -- or maintaining.
Separately, the Ubuntu screen image on my relative's truly mass produced, 17" Dell LCD is shifted slightly to the right -- just enough to hide the rightmost few pixels. An old 17" LCD I have plugged into an old T42, has a similar shifting. Useable, but slightly annoying, particularly with respect to today's anorexic scroll bars.
I did a little research into the problem, months ago, but did not find a ready solution. Not WiFi, but still slightly to moderately awkward.