I brought home my old Thinkpad T41p from work for a few days; I had wiped out its disk in preparation for giving it to someone else, and so I had to install a new OS. My first plan was just to install Windows XP, but I didn’t have an OEM disk nearby, so I couldn’t use the license key which came with the machine.
So I decided to go the Ubuntu route. I had a 7.04 CD on hand, which installed with no problems, and then I upgraded to 7.10. That was all in the office, connected to a wired Ethernet.
But I wanted to be able to use the machine on my wireless LAN at home (and elsewhere). Using Network Manager and typing in my preshared WPA key didn’t work. And I tried it many, many times.
Eventually, I found wieman01’s OWTO: Wireless Security – WPA1, WPA2, LEAP, etc., which worked wonderfully well — I am up and running on my wireless right now.
I don’t know how easy it’ll be to set things up to connect to an old WEP network, which was my real goal in bringing this beast home for a few days, but I’m sure it can be done.
I do wish I knew why Network Manager didn’t do the job, though. Suggestions welcome.
Might read this /. thread: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/30/1742258
Apparently the default hdparm settings in ubuntu are too aggressive and can prematurely age the drive. I’m on the worlds slowest EVDO connection so I can’t find the actual setting you need to change but it’s linked off the slashdot article.
Here, this was the additional link: https://launchpad.net/bug59695.html