I can't seem to connect to the internet on my college campus. I just moved in and they told me that it isn't encrypted, but I will be given a log in page. I think Linux is connecting ok, but it seems to be trying to stop the login page from loading when I open firefox, as I got the home google page on my laptop when I booted, and on my PC the last webpage I had visited, but if I try to go to facebook or something it looses the connection.
So is there something I should be doing? Because I know my laptop has been having issues getting my wireless to work. At my grandmother's house it wouldn't connect, it had problems with authentication and at my home it was dhcp. If I ever did connect, it would connect for awhile and then if I let it sit for a few minutes and came back, it wouldn't connect no matter what. I was wondering if this is some power-saving mechanism.

If you have an authenticating proxy, set your proxy information. On FireFox and similar, it's Edit->Preferences->Advanced->Proxies

doesn't seem to be doing anything for me. I tried 'no proxy', 'autodetect proxy settings for this network'. there are also a manual configuration, and a configuration field to add a url, but I don't think it should be this difficult.

Have you asked the guys running the network about using FireFox on Linux? Sometimes people waste money on proprietary malware to restrict network access (you can do the same things with free software but not require people to have gatezware). The definitive test of course would be to set up the desktop PC as a bridge with 2 NICs and log the packets coming and going from a laptop running WinDuhs - looking through the log will give you a good idea of what's going on, and if it's all cleartext as you were told, it should be fairly obvious what goes on. (In addition to all the gatezware spying on you and sending information back to the gatez of hell.)

Ok, I haven't seen the tech guy on campus yet, but I did get connected, barely. Installed Wicd on Slackware 12.1 and got it connected to the local hotspot at... 15% It just barely went up enough for me to get connected and I guess it is holding on for dear life to it's ip.
The problem though is that my laptop is getting much better wireless ratings, up in 70%, 80%, but it freezes as Wicd is trying to obtain a ip address.
I know I only got a good connection on my PC when I set it to rate reception in dBm, and then I could connect, when I tried that in my laptop, I got terrible reception, but same results of no ip.