I cloned an Ubuntu 7.04 VMWare Workstation 6.0 virtual machine, and found that the cloned VM booted without network access. dmesg | grep eth0 showed that the pcnet32 driver was loaded fine and detected eth0, but ifconfig doesn’t list eth0, and ifconfig -a lists eth1 which is down. WTF?

Today I’ve installed both the desktop and server versions of Ubuntu linux, primarily so I can run Kismet and diagnose my wifi LAN problems. As much as I’d rather use OpenBSD or FreeBSD, Linux has the broadest WLAN card support, and is Kismet’s preferred platform.

I’ve grown quite unaccustomed to installing UNIX-based OSes with a dick-holding install process. With the BSDs, you’re left to type in the partition table, set a root password, and if you screw it up, well, go back to Windows 98 you pussy.