I recently set up a wireless home network. My family insisted that I secure the network with wpa. I have two computers - a laptop and a desktop. I have long ago gotten wireless working on the laptop, and it connects to the network and the internet with no issues. However, the desktop has been less cooperative.

I followed a tutorial on using wpa_supplicant in Ubuntu, which essentially tells me to install the network-manager applet which will do it all for me. Indeed, this all works beautifully on the laptop, but on the desktop, even after loading the (ndiswrapper) driver, the applet still does not recognize any wireless networking devices.

So I went the more CLI way. Here I've had limited success. According to ifconfig and iwconfig, I am in. However, browsers and ping refuse to resolve any hostnames. If I go on the laptop and get the IP address for www.google.com, and type that into my desktop's Firefox, I get google. The network is running dhcp, and the desktop is being assigned an IP address.

What's up and what can I do?

Sounds to me like you are having problems with resolving hostnames. Back up the /etc/resolv.conf file from the desktop, then copy the /etc/resolv.conf from the laptop over to the desktop. Hope this helps.

As for the network applet, I'm not sure. I haven't dealt with networks with GUI tools much.

That was my first instinct as well, but from the start both computers had identical /etc/resolv.conf 's.