Wireless Connection on Ubuntu

In a previous post I mentioned that I have a laptop that was not going to meet Microsoft Vista’s minimum requirements and that paying for another computer when my laptop works find just wasn’t an option. So I removed Windows and installed Ubuntu Linux 6.10 as my new operating system.

I’m only a beginner in Linux world so if your contemplating the switch from Windows then follow along. I’m fortunate enough to have a Mac as well so when things don’t work on the Linux machine I can still get things done on the Mac.

So after my initial install of Ubuntu, the main issue I had was that I couldn’t connect to my wireless router using WPA encryption. I spent some amount of time searching for what I expected to be a simple fix. Unfortunately there are dozens of examples on the web that you could try and you really don’t know if they are going to work or not but I did find a fairly simple solution that got my wireless up and running and still maintained WPA security.

A trusty Google search found an article on how to setup WPA wireless on Ubuntu at the Debian admin website. Now to do the fix you will need to follow some fairly simple command line instructions in the terminal window and have a basic understanding of how to do this. You need to edit one text file and create one text file and be able to reboot your system. I don’t know exactly what each step in the process does but it works.

I hope this helps some new Ubuntu linux users save some time in getting your Ubuntu Linux wireless connection up and running.