Hi guys, I need some help connecting to the internet through ubuntu. I have vista co-installed. I have a linksys wireless router in my house, and i can access it easily through vista, but i can not get to it through ubuntu. i have a dell inspirion 1520 with a Dell Wireless 1390 WLAN Mini-card rev 4.4. How can i get to the internet through my router, and please exlpainn in words i can understand, i am very new to ubuntu and am not familiar with it at all.

Check if Dell has a Linux driver for the wireless card. You will need to install the driver, which is a major challenge for newbies. Alternatively, the workaround is to try another distro which may have the driver included.

I had the same problem. What you need is ndiswrapper.

It's software that can read a windows driver and translate for ubuntu.

The only version that I found that worked was ndiswrapper-util-1.9

Put it on a flash drive, or cd, or read it across your partition. Double click on it and install it. You'll need to drag the .inf and .sys files of the driver to the desktop of ubuntu. Then, open up the terminal (in the taskbar) and type

sudo ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/<i>drivernamehere</i>.inf

and it should install it for you. This is as far as I've gotten. I hope this helps!