No doubt this will seem really easy to someone, but for me, it's got me stumped!

I'm a fairly new Linux user. I tried out the LiveCD of Kubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper) on my laptop, and whilst it found all of my hardware and worked like a charm, it wouldn't allow me to connect to my wireless network, which is WPA encrypted. Looking at the packages through Adept I noted there was one called Network-Manager, which looking online seemed to be the solution. I couldn't install it as I was running LiveCD, so I installed Linux to the machine as I was intending to do anyway. Once I had - Network-Manager wasn't in the list, though it was before. Neither was it on the CD, as I followed some instructions elsewhere to ensure it was looking at the CD. I eventually found it online and installed it, with no errors. All well and good, but .... I can't run it.

I've tried running nm-applet through shell, and it tells me it doesn't exist. I've tried running "NetworkManager" through shell, and it tells me in no uncertain terms "You must be root to use NetworkManager!". So in shell, I used "sudo -i" to effectively give myself root privilidges and ... nothing happens. No error message, nothing runs, nothing changes. I can do it several times with the same result.

So ... am I missing something here? Is there an icon secretly hidden somewhere that I'm missing? I've followed all the instructions that I can find, even though nearly all of them were insistant that Network-Manager was already installed (or should be in the Adept package manager, or in Add/Remove Programs - which it wasn't in either case.)

I find it ironic, as a new user, that everything works flawlessly, including the initial setup of the OS, and yet just installing and running one program has me at my wits end! *lol*

If anyone can advise me what to try next - if anything - I'd be very grateful indeed.

-Andy

And and update:

After yet more searching around, I tried running NetworkManagerDispatcher - which seems to have worked, and now it appears on the menus.

HOWEVER ... it's still not working. If I try to connect by entering the WPA key, it will immidiately get to 28% - "Configuring Device" - and then stop for a minute or two, then give up. No amount of tinkering seems to make it want to do otherwise. Neither can I seem to find any information on the net as to a way to get past this - though plenty of people seem to be having the problem

Much as I hate to say it, if this is the way networking's going to be on Linux - and I'm in no hurry to downgrade my whole network's security to WEP just to get my laptop working - then it's back to .... well, I can't bear to say it. You know the one - begins with W

let me bump this, hopefully someone could give an advice.

I had a similar problem on my laptop with suse 10.1 and even thought ndiswrapper was installed from yast and detected the drivers successfully, I couldn't get it to work. ( this was a while ago, not sure if ndiswrapper was available with yast or not )

I had the same problem with the card showing '28 % configuring device' error

It didn't matter what I did. I removed ndiswrapper, downloaded ndiswrapper from their site and later installed it to face the same problem over and over again.

I got to the point where I thought it was an incompatible card and I removed it and installed an older card ( intel2200 ) that according to suse HCL list it was shown as compatible with different versions...still, it didn't work.
someone suggested to use ( if I can remember correctly ) the ifup method when setting up the wireless card, instead of the 'networkmanager controller'....but it didn't help neither way.