Comment 69 for bug 44194

Thanks to everyone who figured this bug out. I installed backported versions of ifupdown and netbase from Intrepid and this specific problem seems to be solved for me.

However, after having to hunt down the apparent cause of the problem (useless wlan0 interface being brought up at boot which does actually work properly after an ifdown/ifup combination but not before) in order to be able to formulate it in a way that might yield decent search results, then having to sift through the usual "hit everything with a hammer" antics on Ubuntu Forums ("sleep 20", inserting "ifdown/ifup" in random init.d files) before finally striking gold in the form of this and numerous duplicate bug reports, it is somewhat disappointing that two years or so pass before anything resembling a fix is pushed out, and by then no-one is interested in applying it to the "long term support" release. (It would also have helped had I not needed to strip away layer upon layer of tools - KNetworkManager and the intrusive/disruptive avahi-daemon/avahi-autoipd - all to accomplish the probably extremely common use-case of wanting to automatically connect to one's home network.)

I know that people are reluctant to update packages in released distributions in order to avoid breaking functionality, but when the definition of a "fix" excludes the act of making functionality work that was broken upon a distribution's release, one has to wonder which caveats also apply to the definitions of "support", "long term support" and "update" being used, especially since I started out with the Kubuntu 8.04.2 "update" which was surely released after the fixes issued above. And suggesting that people just upgrade to the next distribution version isn't exactly acceptable, even without such things as the KDE 3-to-4 transition which would be involved if I were to chase the fixed packages, not least because I might well experience breakage elsewhere. In the end, I'd be running some beta or other, which would hardly be consistent with the original objective of running a stable, working distribution.