As the title says on linux mint maya using my netgear wireless WNA3100 card I can only connect to the internet using firefox for about 1 minute. During that time I can surf the web as usual , but after that, web pages won't load anymore. I tried pinging sites in the terminal to no avail . I just recently installed ndiswrapper for my wireless card but that's about the only change I've made to the system. I'm not sure if it's a DNS error or something but I have no clue. I also had the same problem on ubuntu 12.04 so I thought it was relative and switched to mint. Same thing. Any help will greatly be appreciated.

During the outage, try ping 8.8.8.8, which is Google's nameserver google-public-dns-a.google.com. If you can ping by IP but not by name, then your problem is DNS.

If ping by IP doesn't work, try traceroute to see how far your connection gets.