I recently developed a need to connect to a Virtual Private Network (VPN) from Linux at home. Here's the result of my experience, using both Mandriva 2007 and Ubuntu Edgy.

Mandriva 2007

Mandriva recently added a"drakvpn" wizard which integrates with their "net_applet" networking applet that I like. I was hopeful it would meet needs to connect the PPTP VPN with a username and password.

It fell immediately because it didn't even support username and password authentication. Next.

Next I tried the Kvpnc package for Mandriva 2007. This looked promising, but appeared to require a "remote network" address, which I didn't know. In any case, the connection didn't seem to work.

Finally, I tried the "pptpconfig" package. It failed with a mysterious error as well. The documentation suggested I use the low-level "tcpdump" utility to debug it further. Not user-friendly.

Ubuntu Edgy

At this point I tried connecting from another machine on my home network, which had Ubuntu Edgy installed. Ubuntu didn't have a VPN client built-in as far as I could tell. However, from some quick poking around in the Synaptic software installation tool, I was able to find some packages related to VPN and PPTP that looked right. I installed network-manager-gnome, network-manager-pptp and network-manager. Once installed, running nm-applet (Alt-F2 nm-applet) provided a networking applet, much like the one I like in Mandriva.

From here I could access a wizard to set up a new VPN connection. While many options were supported, I was able to use the defaults for everything, including skipping defining a remote network range. The connection was completed successfully on the first try. A score for Ubuntu!

Later, I found out there was not one, but three network ranges that I could ideally limit the VPN connection to. The preferences had a clear option for me to provide this information, and this customization also worked without further fuss.

The last time I looked at putting Ubuntu on my ThinkPad T20 laptop, I couldn't confirm that the suspend and resume features worked on Ubuntu. However, there are reports that suspend can work with Ubuntu on the T20.

Considering that Ubuntu already looks good when compared to Mandriva 2007, perhaps I'll have to reconsider the switch.