[PLUG] Browser Blues - Continued

[Michael M.]

Jim Karlock wrote:
> I have tried four Linux's on a Qwest DSL line. The only one that was 
> able to browse the web "out of the box" was Knoppix. Ubuntu, FC3 and FC4 
> didn't work. (Knoppix was the only one without FireFox.) I downloaded 
> the Debian single CD version and installed it. It couldn't find two 
> different mirrors to begin installing. Presumably another victim of the 
> Qwest DSL line.
> 
> FC3 & FC4 both worked after changing the primary DNS from the local 
> modem to the Qwest one:  205.171.3.65 and changing the secondary DNS to: 
> 205.171.2.65. Unfortunately these revert back after a reset (or perhaps 
> it was a power cycle).
> 
> FC4 also seems to have lost my ML-2010 Samsung printer after it was 
> working when I left the computer and printer at a friend's place for use 
> on their Qwest DSL.
> 
> Needless to say it is highly embarrassing to leave a working computer 
> for a friend to use, only to find that it can't serf or print the next 
> day. Is there a less troublesome distribution around and where do I get it?

One thing I was wondering is whether Gentoo would work best with this 
issue.  One of the USE flag options in Gentoo is IPv6 support, meaning 
that you can strip it out of the kernel and every app that is IPv6 aware 
by compiling with the IPv6 USE flag turned off globally.  I would think 
that might take care of the problem until Qwest starts supporting IPv6, 
but that's just a guess on my part.  You might ask in a Gentoo forum if 
you think it's worth investigating.

Of course, technically, you could recompile everything in any distro 
with customizations, including removing IPv6 support, but Gentoo is the 
only distro I know of that is set up to make that kind of thing easy. 
It would be a PITA on Debian, maybe less of one on Slackware.

This is another reason I'm going to investigate FreeBSD when I get my 
new computer.  I do not have this issue under OS X, it works fine.  OS X 
uses a BSD-variant subsystem (it rides on top of a Darwin kernel), so my 
bet is that FreeBSD would not have this problem either.  I seriously 
doubt that Windows has this issue either, or I imagine we all would have 
heard much more about it.  From what I've read, Microsoft lifts some of 
the Windows network stack from BSD, which is another reason to suspect 
that the BSDs don't have this problem.  I'm kind of dismayed at the fact 
that this has been a Linux issue since at least 2004 and still has not 
been fixed.  Far be it from me to question the priorities of the Linux 
kernel developers, but I would think this is an issue that should get 
higher priority than it has.  There's a thread in the Ubuntu developers' 
forum that discusses this problem in which one of the contributers said 
some people have told him "I tried Ubuntu, but the internet didn't 
work."  So they went back to Windows.  This isn't a good strategy for 
spreading Linux adoption.

-- 
Michael M. -- Portland, OR -- USA
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions 
of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to 
dream." -S. Jackson