Karmic Koala – post install notes

Installed Ubuntu 9.10 a few days ago. Everything seemed OK (very very nice actually) except for a little network performance glitch that may also bother you.√Ǭ† Canonical has once again taken Linux one step further away from the status of geek-challenge to a user friendly alternative to other OS’es.

One thing bothered me though – general network responsiveness seemed seriously degraded. Digging around i found that IPv6 had taken precedence to IPv4 in a few ways – one being DNS lookup sequence. Apparently all lookups was attempted through IPv6 first. My router and network is in no way configured for IPv6 and therefore every connection-attempt to uncached hosts would have to wait for the IPv6 timeout. Two things gave me responsiveness back.

1. Disable IPv6 at the OS level
2. Disable IPv6 in Firefox (should give more responsiveness for any OS not running on an IPv6 network)

Maybe you would think that the first step would be enough, but Firefox seems more responsive after step 2. Follow this step to disable IPv6 in Firefox.

Ubuntu 9.10 introduces the GRUB2 bootloader on clean installations only. The upgrade process from, say version 9.04, will not upgrade GRUB and will leave you with the previous version.

To disable IPv6 OS wide, i followed this sequence and voila – responsiveness returned to my netbook (and soon to my other Ubuntu installations).

2009-11-22 update: Had to downgrade to 9.04 again – No matter what I did, which forums I visited – I could not get my Huawei 3G Modem to connect.