[penguicon-general] yet another Ubuntu question

[Tim Schmidt]

On 6/5/07, LadySarah <ladysarahmarie at gmail.com> wrote:
> I know in windows activating my wifi requires two steps; activating the
> wireless and then actually making it function.  Does anyone know if Ubuntu
> also has two steps??  I can't seem to get it to activate and the laptop
> doesn't want to play with an ethernet cable in either platform.
>
> I tried setting everything up over the phone with John but he didn't have
> Ubuntu in front of him and couldn't figure out a way to hack it from my
> descriptions.  And also give John all the credit in the world because he
> tried for over an hour to help me get something to play nice on my computer
> and nothing ended up being willing to play.

In the best of circumstances, Ubuntu will come with the driver and/or
firmware for your wireless card and handle everything automatically.
You'll get a little icon in the upper-right corner of the screen that
vaguely resembled two computer monitors.  If you click on it, it will
show the available wireless networks to connect to, along with signal
strength, and any wired networks.  That little piece of software is
called NetworkManager.  NetworkManager attempts to connect to the best
interface available - if it detects an ethernet cable that's plugged
in, it'll attempt to use that.  Otherwise, it will attempt to connect
to the strongest wireless network.

If that doesn't work out of the box, you've got hardware that's not
well supported by Ubuntu.

Crack open a terminal, become root (by typing in 'sudo su' without the
ticks, and entering your password), and run lspci and lsusb and paste
the output into a response.  That will give me some idea of what
hardware you have, from which I can point you in the right direction.

--tim