Hey all noobs - I had a huge problem with wifi not working and gurus around the web and here on LQ ("asymptote" and "alan ri" especially) all offering support but nothing worked. There are lots of good people on the larger web willing to help but unfortunately the quality of their solutions is not always up to the mark with missing commands, missing switches on commands, and bad syntax all most frustrating for a newbie (like me). So in desperation after several days of trying different stuff I turned off the wifi (with the little switch on the lower front panel) - rebooted - waited for all disk activity to stop - turned the little switch on - PRESTO - Ubuntu saw the network and hooked me up. It was that simple. If this saves one person a few days of frustration and wasted time then my work is done!!

The Ubuntu family of distributions is pretty good at automatically finding and configuring hardware. Sometimes it needs a little help such as this solution. Thanks for sharing your experience.