Over at the Goodbye, Microsoft web site, Brad R. takes Ubuntu to task for abandoning dial-up modem users. Apparently Ubuntu no longer includes the GnomePPP dial-up package in the distribution, without which you can’t get online via dial-up. It gets better: if you do have some way to connect, when you download something from the Ubuntu repository, the first thing Ubuntu does is update its 16+ megabyte repository index. Happy waiting! Brad concludes that “Ubuntu is for broadband users only.”
And people stuck in 1997.
On a more serious note, it’s still in Debian so you could always use a decent version of ‘Ubuntu’ instead…
It’s also still in Ubuntu, only not on the CD!
lol seriously who uses dial-up internet connections these days? Retiring obsolete technology is in fact, a good thing IMO.
Ubuntu frames itself as being for everyone, with a specific Africa angle.
They really think most people in Africa are going to have a broadband connection?
I always removed it upon installation, so it is not harming people in Australasia/Europe/North America for the most part, but for them to be targeting Africa in particular, and then leave out such an important tool for the kind of obsolete tech it seems like most people have over there seems like a bad move.
Couldn’t agree more. I still remember how painful was the Linux update process on a dialup. All repository goodies that you praise on a broadband working against you. There were some primitive tools to help but they were primitive and buggy, I ended up writing my own.
Most people in Africa doesn’t have internet at all. Internet adoption is like 10-15%.
So what’s your comment saying? That they’ve done right by dropping dial-up because it’s only 10-15% anyway?
There are slightly more pressing issues in the a lot of countries than internet access.
Edited 2012-06-18 18:00 UTC
They’re NOT dropping dial-up, the only change is that gnome-ppp (and presumably wvdial) is not on the install CD. It is still available from the repos and it does come with cli dialup tools. NetworkManager also supports USB modems, iirc.
I”m not stating it’s right (or wrong), I’m saying that most people in Africe simply do not have Internet access at all.
Hey idiot, if gnome-ppp and wvdial are *NOT* on the install cd, mjust how in hell are you supposed to install it since you won’t have acess to the repos since you need a dialup connection to get acess to the repos which you won’t have?
God save the human race from genetic defectives like yourself.
Off to a good start there, buddy.
You could read what I have said numerous times already: there are still cli tools for using serial/pci modems.
I’m going to guess that most modems today though are USB ones and those are supposedly supported by NetworkManager which is, you know, included by default.
Yeah, because you always win factual arguments with cheap personal attacks. Always.
Suffice it to say, when Internet access does become more popular in more remote areas of the world, dial-up will NOT be the desired nor implemented option. You really think they’re running (or going to run) copper wire all over Africa and other places? No, it’s all mobile phones with related broadband Internet access (3g/4g/whatever). Want Internet access on your PC? You get it through your phone. THIS is the direction the world is headed in for these places, not to dial-up Internet over POTS.
Poor people use dial-up, Africa is poor, therefore Africa uses dial-up. Syllogistic logic at its finest.
If anything, dial-up is a luxury that only the industrialized world can afford. Landline penetration in Africa is very low and most personal internet access is carried informally over cellular networks. Tethering is your best bet in Africa.
Well, your deduction is based on wrong premises.
First, nobody wrote “poor people use dial-up”. The fact is that this “primitive” technology that the whole world used to use 15 or 20 years ago to access the Internet is STILL used in Africa. Nobody ever said that it’s still being actively promoted and deployed.
And guess what, broadband here in France is also mainly based on landline. Cellular networks in the parts of Africa I know use GPRS at best. No 4G, no 3G. That too is an old technology.
Second, “most personal internet access is carried informally over cellular networks” is also wrong. Data over cellular networks is so expensive and so slow that I, living normally in Europe, gave up squandering money over unreliable data link that had problems that even Opera Turbo had a hard time overcoming. And like hundreds of thousands of other people, I turned for the rest of my stay to Internet cafés, all of which use DSL via landlines, often coupled with Wi-Fi. My next stay starts in a week and, being now a freelance worker, I only hope (in vain, I’m sure) that things got better.
Most internet access may indeed be carried over cell networks, but not because it is the best option or the most affordable option. It’s simply the only option. Even using Skype to call people in Côte d’Ivoire or in Benin ends up with countless interruptions. And the people I call are using… pricey mobile data access.
The real problem is Africa is that there isn’t money to build and maintain the infrastructures, whatever their price (mobile equipment) relative to more massive investments (building a correct landline network).
People who haven’t experienced first hand the Internet access conditions over there don’t know what it’s like to not be able to speak to your family on a Skype call.
You’ve had me laughing there. Do you imagine anyone willing to use dial-up when given another option?
It’s called “reading between the lines”.
Actually, a number of comments have said something to the effect of “pretty sure most of Africa”. To the contrary, your statement is a bogeyman as I was never arguing against the assertion that dial-up is “still being actively promoted and deployed” in Africa. In a narrow sense, I was arguing against the notion that dial-up is the primary method of connecting to the internet in Africa.
But if you think that my intention was to merely correct a technical error made by some commenters, then you’ve missed my point entirely.
Still missing my point…
I am talking about Africa, of course, not Europe. I also meant to emphasize the word “informal”, by which I mean that internet access often is routed through intermediaries, like paying a person in your village to use the internet through their cell phone.
Precisely. Dial-up is rarely an option.
Correct.
I do, in fact. It sucks.
Glad I had you laughing, it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek to enhance my point about people’s ignorance about Africa. Of course they would use another option, and similarly just as dial-up is usually not an option in Africa dial-up is rarely used.
BTW, when a buddy of mine had possibly comparably bad VoIP conditions (a totally over-utilised shared LAN connected via poor radio link on one end, and on the other a dial-up deep in CIS – fairly unreliable and slow even as far as dial-up goes), it turned out that the software makes a huge difference. Skype was nearly unusable.
GTalk client (the win32 one at least) coped significantly better with poor connectivity, turned out to be the optimal choice; you might try it out – and there still might be software which is even better (it’s just that GTalk worked fine for the purpose), this field still improves (also with codecs – I remember stumbling on some recent ones which offer perfectly intelligible coding of speech at less than 1kbps)
BTW, one additional data point to your “Le ignorance” post: http://www.opera.com/smw/2012/03/
Edited 2012-06-26 00:18 UTC
How is one going to update a distro without at least a 1mb/s connection?
It’s possible but requires some patience.
sudo apt-get -d full-upgrade
…wait for the updates to download…
then just run the gui update tool from the unity menu
I use 12.04 on a less-than-stellar mobile broadband connection and that works for me.
Wouldn’t want to do it on dial-up though but that’s where tools like Keryx comes in.
Edited 2012-06-18 12:58 UTC
If you go by that school of thought; Most people in Africa probably wouldn’t have the 32 cpu cores and 8000 GB RAM required to run Unity anyway.
I know Ubuntu is an African word and Shuttelworth is South African, but I don’t recall ever reading that they were “targeting” Africa specifically. Even if they were, they sure aren’t now looking at the system requirements.
It does sound a bit strange, though. Pppoe-whatever packages are probably just a few kb, and someone living in a rural place with only dial-up wouldn’t have the ability to download the packages if he couldn’t get connected in the first place. Then again, I suppose someone with dial-up wouldn’t be downloading a 600mb ISO anyway.
Edited 2012-06-18 14:01 UTC
Two things.
One, Ubuntu does not and has never had a “specific Africa angle”. Mark Shuttleworth is South African – that explains the name. There is nothing else to explain. The stated goal of Ubuntu is simply to make their software available free of charge on equal terms to everyone, and well that is it. If they were trying to solve Africa’s problems I’m pretty damn sure they would be doing something completely different…
Second… You don’t know what you are talking about. Less than 3% of the population of Africa have landline telephone, and only a fractional percentage of those with landlines even have dialup capability. The number WiMax/Cellular internet users in Africa far outweigh the number of dial up user (by at least a few orders of magnitude). WiMax/Cellular data use in Africa is growing dramatically, about 4X faster than the rest of the world in the last 10 years (although it is still relatively small). Dialup? Never even got off the ground there. Africa will likely never have more than maybe .25% dialup users, if that.
90% or so of ALL internet users in Africa are in South Africa, Morroco, or Egypt. About half of them are on some form of wireless. In the rest of Africa it is closer to 98% wireless, because they simply don’t have the infrastructure for anything else – even dialup.
In short the about the last place on earth where this matters is Africa. It is a much bigger problem for the US, which still has a very sizable dialup userbase.
Other than their name, what makes you think Ubuntu is targeting Africa? Is Apple a company that focuses on selling devices for Fruitarians?
Some people have no choice…
And some of us occasionally travel to locations where dialup is the only option, and its more than adequate for checking email etc.
They should include the ppp dialer on the default install cd, even if its not installed by default, the rest of the ppp stack is presumably included for pppoe/3g users and the like anyway so its not a lot of extra space, and someone on such a connection won’t want to be downloading it.
There’s nothing stopping you from installing gnomeppp before going to such an area.
Ubuntu also comes with CLI ppp tools (pppconfig, pppd, pon etc) by default so it’s not like it’s not there for those who need it initially.
Took me about 30 seconds or so to find that out, couldn’t have been that hard for the guy at goodbyemicrosoft to do the same.
Edited 2012-06-18 07:53 UTC
I assumed those would be what they removed, since they’re probably included in the GnomePPP-whatever meta-package, knowing how Ubuntu likes to do “everything + kitchen sink” packaging.
If they aren’t, then it’s fine, I guess.
Edited 2012-06-18 14:09 UTC
lol, like only 20% of the USA. And most of Africa.
Millions. Millions and millions and millions of people.
There are still a bunch of people (yes even here, in Canada) that depend on dialup because faster technologies haven’t pierced through sparsely populated areas.
Also, if I’m not mistaken, some countries in Africa and other parts of the world still don’t provide media as fast as in Japan, Western Europe or the US.
Getting rid of old technology is only good when doing so will force newer technologies to take its place.
As mentioned upthread, dialup isn’t actually that common in Africa – they’ve sort of skipped landlines and gone directly to cellphones.
LOL at your lack of knowledge. Dial-up is still very much alive and well.
I’m not seeing much cable or fiber run to the various farms around the area.
I’m not seeing universal coverage from wireless signals; maybe the local cell tower lacks the latest dish for mobile data.
I’m not seeing affordable highspeed that fits into everyone’s budgets; 20$ or less for a modem is more affordable than 50$ or more for cable/isdn.
Local carriers still offer dial-up subscriptions so there must be enough demand to continue supporting it.
Don’t poopoo modems just because you can’t think beyond your uberl33t couch.
Because you’ve just made sure anyone on dialup will go with Windows because Linux is “broken” as far as they are concerned? And i hate to break the news to ya but in large sections of the USA you’ll be lucky to be able to use a 3G modem, and I’m not talking the hills of WV either, when I spent a couple of years in downtown Nashville right off music row there was NO DSL or Cable because the duopoly had cherry picked and refused to run any lines, happy to just keep gouging current customers with higher fees than lay pipe.
So maybe if you are in some highly populated section of EU you might think its funny and worthless to have dialup, but until a WISP opened up in my area a year ago frankly it was that or insanely priced satnet for my mom, who lives less than a block from the end of a junction where the cable and DSL ends. you can literally see the lines from her front porch, neither will run it to her. I don’t know how things are where you live but I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the southern USA and I can tell you even college towns will have areas in town with NO SERVICE, its just pathetic.
It is “funny” also when you’re in sparsely populated areas of the EU (there are quite a few of those – including somewhat indigent ones)
Fix abuses from your carriers (though I guess the sacred cow of “free market” might get in the way…)
In many part of rural Canada its not economically viable to extend broadband access. Many of these people still use dial up.
Just because in big cities some technologies are not used any more(although im sure there are plenty of people inside the big cities who still use dial up) does not mean that they have disapeared and are useless.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2012/05/21/dialup-internet-…
Edited 2012-06-19 19:43 UTC
“Ubuntu is for broadband users only.”
Uh… no shit?
I mean, seriously, come on… this is 2012. The entire distribution comes on a full CD-size image that comes with just about everything you’d expect in a modern operating system when it comes to programs. It has a massive repository that makes everything Microsoft has to offer look like a joke. The programs that it does come with sure as hell aren’t “lightweight” by dial-up-era standards which was… 1995? 1998?
Seriously, get with the times, or as another poster said… just use Debian and customize it with smaller, lighter programs and a simple window manager. Or just install CrunchBrang and end up with a more lightweight system without excess fiddling to get everything installed and set up. Hell, for that matter, just read that new OSNews article about “lightweight” distributions and use one of those; using Ubuntu with such restrictions is just asking for trouble.
Edited 2012-06-18 06:29 UTC
As far as I know, you can still order free copies of the CD if you don’t have a way to download and/or burn them.
Which default (installed from the CD) programs require broadband internet access specifically? Email, basic web browsing, instant messaging, and posting to blogs can be accomplished very well on dial-up speeds. OpenOffice/LibreOffice, games, graphics programs and such do not require internet access at all to function properly. Even simple online games like MUDs and multiplayer strategy games can be played via dial-up. I used to use my phone company’s backup dial-up line when the DSL service went down to play World of Warcraft back in the mid 2000s, and I never had any issues except in really large raids.
Speaking of, we didn’t have DSL in our area until 2001, and cable broadband until 2003. And that’s on the outskirts of Atlanta, one of the largest and most tech-friendly cities in the U.S. Not everyone was flying the broadband skies in 1998, as apart from businesses no one needed it. Broadband only became really popular around here due to Napster and other P2P services.
That’s actually a great idea! Ubuntu turns its back on dial-up users, they definitely should find a distro that still caters to their needs. We all do that anyway, right? I use Arch because it suits my needs better than Slackware did. I don’t hate Slackware, I just rarely use it anymore.
When I say lightweight, I’m not talking about the general lack-of-heavy-network-use that you seem to be thinking.
When I say that the programs are not lightweight, I mean they are not some tiny 2MB programs that, when compressed into packages, can be downloaded in relatively no time even on 56K. These are big, often bloated it could be argued, programs to begin with… and certainly updating the programs alone will not be done in an instant. Consider just the sizes of the programs alone and you can expect an occasional system update–even without the 16MB repository sync–fetching quite a few megabytes worth of packages.
Edited 2012-06-18 07:58 UTC
Also, until very recently, I used Freedom Toasters [http://www.freedomtoaster.org/] in my area to get every Ubuntu distro as they come out. Freedom Toasters are all over South Africa. The Freedom Toasters also contain other distros, OpenOffice etc etc… Simply take your blank CD/DVD and burn whatever you want free of charge. Some Toasters are located in restrictive WIFI areas too, so you can even bring a laptop, connect to the toaster and download what you need.
Another brilliant idea by the Shuttleworth Foundation.
Yes a lot of half working programs or programs that are already available for Windows.
Drat.. couldn’t resist..
Not likely what they meant but I’ve often felt the same way; comparing equal objects. The Windows repository is Windows Update. Looking at the Ubuntu repository, Windows Update pales by comparison. Especially when you consider what benefit Microsoft could provide the end user if they used the repository properly. Seems that MS is actually trying to do so with the new app store for Windows8 so we’ll see how it works out.
And yet also a ton of solid working programs that are not available for Windows. But, you have a specific personal agenda to promote so; hate on good sir!
There are countless independent “repositories” for Windows software: Amazon.com. Download.com. Gog.com. File Hippo, Steam, SourceForge….
Collectively, their program libraries are enormous — easy to find and easy to use.
The first impression a Windows user is likely to have of the Ubuntu Store is “Pathetic.”
There is much that will strike him as antiquated or bizarre:
The default install of Chromium, for example, does not support audio and video.
Of those only Steam qualifies as a repo in this context.
You know how you lose an argument? You start to make things up and pretend they’re facts. Chromium (and Chrome) supports both audio and video by default.
Edited 2012-06-19 03:48 UTC
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Given how the major smartphone platforms have sold users on the idea of an “app store” over the past few years, I’d say they might just feel right at home there. Sure, it’s not the 100,000 apps the big phone OSes have, but who needs 1000 fart apps or 7000 ringtone apps for their desktop PC? Pure numbers mean nothing if they don’t fit the purpose.
Given too that the vast majority of apps in the Ubuntu store are completely free to download and use, I’d say Windows users would find relief from the onus of sifting through dozens of malware-infested “free” programs for that platform, looking for the golden trifecta of truly freeware, fully functional, malware-free apps.
Are all those software sources accessible through a single package manager?
I don’t know if it’ll parse or not but what me and my customers use for third party updates is Ninite..
http://ninite.com/
You don’t even have to know what version you have, it’ll skip anything you check if you already have the latest version. Between it and WSUS Offline I can get a machine from a blank drive to a fully loaded and ready to sell Windows machine in under an hour and a half, with only 2 clicks from me about 1 hour in. couldn’t be simpler.
As for him “hating” you seem to be forgetting that how EXACTLY is a user supposed to magically know which are good and which are half baked junk? Play software roulette? Spend hours in the forums which will just send you around in circles as half will always say its great and the other half say its poo?
Its not hate to point out when something is broken and frankly half baked software shouldn’t even be IN the repos in the first place, the fact that so much of it is just helps to illustrate the fact that the whole repo idea needs to be rethought. A handful of guys simply can’t provide QA and QC on that many packages, its just not possible. again don’t know if it’ll parse as links always seem to be hit and miss for me but here is an excellent article by one of the RH devs saying the whole system needs to be tossed, that “Linux is paying now for mistakes made 20 years ago” and he does make some VERY valid points.
https://plus.google.com/109922199462633401279/posts/HgdeFDfRzNe
I lol’d.
Well, technically Microsoft isn’t offering much software, but neither is Canonical. I mean how much software Canonical has actually written? Some package manager for GUI? That’s an achievement.
My point is, you can have all your Ubuntu open source repos (and I’ll even throw FreeBSD’s ports, lol), I’d rather have my software that runs on Windows and not on Linux.
So yeah… “makes look like a joke”.
“The Windows repository is Windows Update. Looking at the Ubuntu repository, Windows Update pales by comparison.”
This was exactly my point–congrats for probably being the only one to get it. It’s ironic how few people actually read and comprehend a post when it goes against their bias–like, oh, honest jabs at Microsoft for example…
“I lol’d.
Well, technically Microsoft isn’t offering much software, but neither is Canonical. I mean how much software Canonical has actually written? Some package manager for GUI? That’s an achievement.”
The fact is, the programs are obtained by Canonical and compiled for and supported by them for the Ubuntu distro. Sure, primarily it’s technically “third party” but face it… even Microsoft can’t make everything. It’s certainly not unheard for them to outright BUY a company or product to obtain exclusive rights, access and ownership of it. So no one else can use it.
With free/open sourse software, all distros–including Ubuntu–are legally allowed to go grab the source code for such various programs, compile it for their distro, and package it for fast and simple installation and use. And there is no suing if someone takes the code and decides to integrate it in their product in some way.
Edited 2012-06-18 20:42 UTC
There are lot of countries where the dial-up connection is still used.
Whether Ubu wishes to include dial-up packages on the CD or DVD is their choice, but they should definitely note broadband as a “system requirement” since it indeed is.
BTW, in the US there are still many millions in rural areas who have no choice but to use dial-up.
Now go put it back, and add some support for my token ring and wavelan hardware out of the box in case I trip and fall into a time machine which brings me back to the middle ages!
And also get rid of Unity! Unless you want the people of the past to laugh at you.
It’s possible to disable the automatic updates of the repos, you know. Obviously it’s not optimized by default for dial-up.
I find it difficult to believe that GnomePPP is the only option on Ubuntu to deal with AT command based modem devices.
Most “mobile broadband” devices are AT command based and AFAIK Ubuntu handles those through ModemManager, a helper of NetworkManager.
I dial both UMTS modem and landline modem through wvdial, so I find it weird that NetworkManager would handle the former but not the latter.
You script kiddies are funny, just a year ago Ubuntu and the variants had a problem with WiFi working after the installation (dead), the fix was to download a driver package to fix that. Now seeing that a wired connection is “so dark ages” it would be impossible to fix.
Just because you are a few of the privileged minority does not mean everyone else should be forgotten, most of the world does not have broadband and those areas that do, have many who do not use it or can’t.
Reading the comments on this post has been an interesting foray for me into social psychology.
Note the number of comments to the effect of “Africa doesn’t have broadband, Africa depends on dial-up”. Or, “most of the world still uses dial-up”.
Fact: Getting a landline in “most of the world” is a bureaucratic quagmire that involves wrestling with state-owned telcos that may or may not have lines near your village. If anything, the number of landlines in Africa has been decreasing. http://www.budde.com.au/Research/African-Fixed-line-and-Fibre-Telec…
Fact: Cellular penetration rates in sub-Saharan Africa range from 10% to 90%. Uganda happens to be at 31%, FYI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators_of_th…
Fact: Most of the world has not yet suffered the ills of social alienation rendered possible by the advent of home air conditioning, large HDTV’s in basement man caves, and Microsoft’s “a computer in every home” vision. Internet and cellular penetration rates measure usage based on Western assumptions and biases about the way people access information and *prefer* to access information. Just because 31% of Ugandans have cell phone subscriptions does not mean that only 31% of Ugandans have access to a cell phone. A famous example of non-traditional cellular roll outs in Bangladesh: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_Phone
Fact: “Spain is not Uganda.” http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-18408448
I understand that lots of mobile broadband solutions rely on AT commands, but that is irrelevant to my point. People’s assumptions about Africa and the Other continue to be subtly (and not so subtly) biased and inaccurate. In the case of assuming that Africa would naturally be mostly dial-up, it is quite literally based on a Eurocentric view whose fundamental assumption is not portable to the rest of the world, that poor and rural folks use dial-up. Ubuntu’s move, if anything, might help such markets by freeing up that space on the CD for something more useful.
(Personal opinion: that said, I’m sad to see GnomePPP go!)
“Ubuntu is for broadband users only” who don’t know better. As most readers here [should] know, Linux is Linux, drivers, packages and tools are there for anyone to use, it doesn’t matter what the distro owner “includes” by default. Those who [still] use ppp, probably know enough to setup their connections with or without Ubuntu’s defaults.
More likely they are running Windows and buying dial-up service from AOL or their home town provider for $10 a month.
AOL prospered in the nineties because it stripped away layer upon layer of complexity for the user. It is a lesson the geek never seems to learn.
Around 74 percent of the nation’s adults had Internet access in their homes by 2010, but 6 percent were still relying solely on dial-up Internet connections to go online, according to a Federal Communications Commission report that looked at broadband access.
Just last year, AOL, whose more than 3.5 million dial-up users account for the bulk of the business, added 200,000 new dial-up customers to its roster.
According to the FCC report, 21 percent of dial-up users said broadband services weren’t available in their area and 10 percent of rural respondents had only dial-up connections.
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/business/news/plenty-of-interne…]
Just had a look at the listing in Synaptic and sure enough – Gnomeppp is there. Woohoo!
Ok – you can mark me down for trolling now…
Well, to be honest … we’re [almost all] on some sort of broadband these days, so this is not a shocker.
However, I would be satisfied with PPP procesess being disabled in systems which do not use PPP connections.
There’s no need to remove it all, actually. They’re at DVD size anyway …
a) It’s not all removed, there are cli tools for ppp in the default install
b) The Ubuntu install CD is not DVD size, it’s CD size (~700Mb).
Many people hear “broadband” and think “fast,” and it is, but the two are not totally synonymous.
I have fast Internet through my cell phone (faster than basic Road Runner), but the phone identifies itself as a CDC ACM modem. So basically, it’s a very fast serial port on the USB bus, and it uses the AT command set for its basic control.
Hence, I have broadband, but I still need a PPP dialer.
I am running Ubuntu at the moment and the statement about how the distro updates its repository information when downloading a package is false. Also, if the writer was using a USB modem then there is a pretty good chance it would work with Network Manager, which is included with Ubuntu. Up until recently I traveled with a USB modem and it was a simple matter of plugging the modem in and Network Manager would offer to dial-up.
I suspect either the writer was using a modem not supported by Linux or he wasn’t familiar with Network Manager.
“when you download something from the Ubuntu repository, the first thing Ubuntu does is update its 16+ megabyte repository indexâ€
The carat weight of this gem cannot be truly appreaciated unless you ‘ve heard about Canonical’s ambitions to put Ubuntu in smartphones. Want to download a small tetris app? You have to waste 16 megabytes of your quota first. Does Canonical know that in some countries carriers don’t offer contracts with gigabyte quotas? I am paying 50euros for a 350MB contract here. So i have to waste all my daily quota just so Ubuntu can upgrade it’s index, because Canonical isn’t even good at copying the Android Market. Assuming Ubuntu does make it on phones of course. The situation with netbooks that also use mobile networks is just as bad (though contracts for netbooks -which don’t offer any kind of telephone functionality- are bette here, but still
It’s not done every time you install something. You can configure how often it is done and even, *gasp*, disable the automatic update completely!
Yeah, because it is totally impossible that they’d change this behavior for the smart phone version. Can’t be changed. Ever. Nope.
… idiotic attitude all the blasted time with web developers, many of whom seem to see nothing wrong with blowing 500k or more of javascript on their websites as if broadband has some miraculous penetration even in the major industrialized nations.
Sure, where I live I can get 22mbps down cable for $65/mo… but at that price most of my neighbors ‘broadband’ is the $15/mo 768kbps… I travel just a few dozen miles to the north into Coos County, and 33.6 dialup as a long distance phone call is the BEST connection you’ll find unless you are lucky enough to have line-of-sight to a cell tower. (yeah, right!)
Large swaths of America — like the Dakota’s, like Utah, Like northern New Hampshire or western Maine, have NO broadband, and when they do — as pointed out by another user already — it’s by tethering or on a device that uses PPP… because, as already mentioned, just because it’s operating over PPP doesn’t mean it’s not broadband.
I can’t say I’m shocked by said omission in the latest Ubuntu though — given the current direction shown by web developers it was only a matter of time before operating systems followed suit with the “lame excuses” for half-assed development and deployment practices.
Which increasingly I suspect are being used to cover up laziness, ineptitude, or just plain wishful thinking.
Because again, never attribute to malice what can just as easily be explained by ignorance.
Wow, how hard is this to comprehend? PPP and modem support has not been removed.
NetworkManager supports USB modems, the default install has cli tools for using older modems and you can still install gnome-ppp from the repos. The *only* change is that Gnome-PPP is no longer available on the install CD.
There’s nothing to see here other than the whiny blog rantings from someone who couldn’t even figure out that the cli tools are still there.
… and some people forget that when you say “use the command line” to Joe Sixpack or Susie Sunshine, they’ll tell you to go plow yourself.
… hell, I’ve got over three decades of using computers under my belt and if I wanted to waste time dicking around on the command line, I’d go use my Tandy 1K or Model 16; but last I checked this is 2012, we kind of expect more.
Especially from Ubuntu which started out trying to hide all the *nix BS that there’s no excuse for anymore apart from developers being too lazy to put real front ends on their code. You know, like Android does…
So there’s a little extra works ONCE to get gnome-ppp installed if you’re using an ancient serial or pci modem. Cry me a river.
So do I.
Like expecting that most people in this world with Internet access aren’t stuck with serial/pci modem dial-up?
… Linux for human beings from developed countries.