Ubuntu comes with a nice application called “Hardware Drivers” (a.k.a. jockey-gtk) for installing proprietary drivers for wireless cards and other devices that lack open-source support. This is great, except when your only connection to the Internet is wireless and you have no way to download the driver or firmware you need. Here’s why this situation should change.

NetworkManager, the default wired- and wireless-connection client in Ubuntu, has received a substantial aesthetic makeover for Ubuntu 9.10.  Here’s a look.

More than 600 people registered to attend Atlanta Linux Fest, which was held Sept. 19. Many of the standing-room-only sessions focused on Canonical and Ubuntu. Here are nine Ubuntu-oriented highlights from the event.

Wireless on Linux is a perennial embarrassment.  Although the situation has improved immensely since a few years ago, the inability to get wireless cards working acceptably often tops the list of user frustrations. Here’s an outline of what’s wrong with Ubuntu’s approach to wireless drivers, and how to fix it.

One of the most innovative features to find its way into the Linux kernel recently is support for master mode on several wireless chipsets.  Though there’s been little fanfare surrounding this development, it could soon be giving home users, in particular, another reason to celebrate Ubuntu.

Earlier this year, madwifi.org, which had previously been home to the madwifi project, was “hijacked” (for lack of a better word), leading to much confusion for Linux users looking for wireless drivers.  This unfortunate event highlights the legal and organizational vulnerabilities of free-software projects, which need to take steps to prevent such abuses if they want to be perceived as serious and reliable.

Generally, a fresh installation of Ubuntu is pretty usable out-of-the-box.  But some aspects of the default configuration seem pretty silly to me.  Here are the ones I’d change first if I were in charge of Ubuntu.

File-system privileges

By default, almost every file on an Ubuntu system is readable by everyone.   This means that, under a non-privileged account, I can read system configuration files that normal users have no reason to view, and which might be exploited by a malicious user to gain root access to the system.

In what represents the final victory in the long struggle between the free-software community and Broadcom, the developers of the open-source b43 wireless driver announced a few days ago that they’ve succeeded in reverse-engineering firmware for Broadcom-based cards.