Comment 25 for bug 573273

Hi,

When a bug is triaged, it enters a list of all the triaged bugs for each particular package. Developers then work through the list systematically, based on the importance of the bugs - as you can see this one is set to Medium (simply because hypothetically you could access all of the features through ethernet, and Ubuntu still starts). This means that it isn't at the bottom of the pile, but the ratio of work to available developer time is still very high, and so unfortunately this takes time to resolve. It seems highly likely to me that this is something to do with the hardware identifying itself in a non-uniform way, specific to this US Robotics model. I'm not a developer, but this is what it looks like to me. USR probably accomodate for that in firmware (not drivers) that ship with the device - this is not provided for linux. I appreciate that doesn't make your internet work, though.

Given the nature of this, though, there is a chance it will simply begin to work in the next Ubuntu release, which comes out in October. There will be a big jump forward towards a more up to date kernel, and with it lots of new drivers and driver updates. The fact that this is logged on Launchpad means that developers across many projects can see it, too. It's possible that the hardware will react differently to the newer versions.

This will eventually be fixed in Lucid, but might be fixed already in the next release, Maverick. If you want to test it out, you could find the testing version on the ubuntu site and give it a go. Just an idea - but someone will get to this, it's just we're quite short on resources!