Wireless network is down on Ubuntu startup/boot

After finally finding and buying a PCI wireless card that has a little penguin logo on the package, I found out that it worked, but I had to do "sudo ifdown wlan0; ifup wlan0" on every boot.

The solution for this is:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

...and add a line to your interface definition that reads:

pre-up sleep 7

...this way the network will start 7 seconds later, but with success. (Some systems might need more than 7 seconds, just increase the value.)

Linux on Frankenstein PC hardware still has too many of these annoyances and I don't see them going away at all. Using free software instead of a Mac that just works does have a cost, we have to admit it.

For more information on the interfaces file:

man interfaces