Hello, My name is Chris, I am fairly new to Linux, so i think its safe to say, I don't know what the heck I'm doing.
Anyways..to the problem.
I have an IBM Thinkpad A20m, it has an Intel P3 700MHz, 256MB of ram, and an 80GB HDD. it originally had windows 98, but it crashed so i thought i'd try out Linux. I installed Ubuntu, version 9.10, at that point my wireless card(Belkin F5D7010)worked perfectly fine, its when i upgraded Ubuntu to version 10.04 that it quit working, its not even recognized anymore. I've tried a few other wireless cards as well, an IBM Internal high rate wireless LAN PC Card 26P8030, and a Hawking HWUG1, which is usb, it sees that they are there, and it finds networks, but it wont connect. my Wired network card still functions properly and will go online....any ideas?
P.S....I've also tried connecting to several other wireless networks, protected and not, and it does the same thing for all of them.

Try removing networkmanager

dpkg -r networkmanager

or

dpkg --purge --force-depends networkmanager

and install wicd

apt-get install wicd

Start wicd

wicd

and configure the wireless card. Wicd is pretty much auto, so you might not have to anything after you install it.