Ok, I have this dinosaur of a computer at the house, and I have made it a dual boot computer so that I can use Linux.  A while back I got it running and used it for a while until Ubuntu came out with a new version.  I installed it and it crashed every time I booted it.  It was quite frustrating.  Ubuntu is not ready for mass adoption.

Now Ubuntu has come out with its latest version, 7.10 and I upgraded yet again.  This time it is a lot more stable on this computer, but it has taken me numerous tries to get wireless networking up and running.  Now, I am not a networking genius, but I have amassed at least some skillz, and it took all the tricks I have learned to get this computer back on the internets.

I am sure that if I wired this computer directly to the router with cat5 I am sure it would have worked immediately.  But, there is no way to run a wire from my router to this computer.  That means I have to use a USB Linksys wireless dongle thingy (yes, that is the technical name).

Ubuntu supports the USB thingy, but for some reason I had to unplug and re-plug and then manually configure it in order to make it work.  What the???  I would recommend this OS to more people if the networking was a little easier.  Most people need to be able to just plug in a peripheral and have it work.  If it doesn’t, most people will just give up and go back to Windows.

Here is how I finally configured it and made it work.  I switched over to manual configuration.  I typed in the ssid for my access point and then turned on DHCP and it finally got an IP address and started working.

So, if you are using Ubuntu and a Linksys Wireless-B USB network card this is how you can make it work