Peter Mac And Associates

msi wind u100, ubuntu and wireless grrrr!

Up until earlier this week, I had my lovely little netbook working nicely with Ubuntu 8.04 and a 90% satisfaction rate with the network manager utility. I could connect to my home network, office network and with abit of hassle, other free wifi spots. I started to get a message that my version of ubuntu was now unsupported, so I thought I’d set about upgrading to 10.04 (maybe 10.10 if I had the time).

I chose the default upgrade process using the system update options progressively moving from 8.04 to 9.04, 9.10 and finally settling on 10.04. I did all the upgrading with a hard-wired ethernet cable.

Bang!! unplugged the network cable and moved to the comfort of my living room to finish some minor tweaks. No wireless network connectivity. I thought network manager may have been giving me hell and I heard some good stories about wicd (which I have running with 100% success on my laptop).

Here comes a lesson…are you paying attention? I decided to uninstall network manager and install wicd (in that order). Doh!! Ok, now I have an unconnected netbook with no wireless and ethernet connectivity and I’ve spent the last two mornings on the way to work on the train trying to patch the system with uploads from a usb stick. No fun, no glory.

What I’m going to have to do is burn 10.04 to a bootable memory stick and do a re-install from scratch. Then I’m going to have to pray I can fix the original issue with wireless card. It’s an RA2860 and there’s bundles of articles in discussion forums regarding it’s incompatibility with Linux distros. Here’s praying I don’t have to install XP to get my work done on the train.