Hey All,

I have Ubuntu 5.10 installed on my old IBM Thinkpad 600E. The problem is I can't get online with it. There is no ethernet jack and all I have is a Linksys wireless USB adapter. My roommate has a wireless router with a WEP key that I am trying to connect to.

In network settings, the wireless connection says that interface wlan0, which should be the USB device, is active. I go into it's properties and enable the connection. The first time I try to select the network name, there is nothing in the list and I manually type the name my roommate gave it. After that I can go in and see it plus one or two neighboring wireless connections. Mine however does not have the symbol next to it with the key in it, showing it requires a key. I know for a fact however that it does because this computer used to have Windows XP and required the key. So I put in the key, and leave the key type as "Plain" and let it use DHCP. Then it tries to activate and when it's done, my signal strength is 0% and I have not received any packets even though I have sent some. And the status says wlan0 is idle.

So that is my current situation. I would really love to get this thing online but I don't know what else I can do. Anyone have some suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

What wireless adapter is it - make + model? Although Ubuntu has picked it up without the need for extra drivers, usually security functions will not work without additional configuration through the use of a wireless wrapper such as ndiswrapper or madwifi.