Hello guru's and guree's:

Just yesterday I set my girlfriend up with ubuntu linux, going off all the reviews from people saying how easy it was to use (I prefer red-hat distros myself). We had a care-free install, but of course there were issues with the wireless card (when is there not?).

Once I finally got her card working, we had a little trouble with ndiswrapper causing a kernel panic when we tried to modprobe it, but I believe we solved that by downgrading to a lower version of ndiswrapper.

Our problem is that gaim will not connect for her unless she is directly ethernetted into her router. I have no clue why this would be so specific, which is why Im posting here.

1. Why isn't gaim connecting when shes accessing the internet via her wireless card?

2. What can we do to fix it?

Do all other functions work over the wireless? Have you tried multiple protocols in gaim?

If the internet connection works, I'd suspect either a bad setting in gaim or some form of blocking on the router.

Web browser works, Ill put her in the DMZ temporarily when she gets home to eliminate any router blocking issues. If that doesn't work I guess we could try a fresh install. I'll post my results.

Upgrade to Pidgin 2.0; the beta versions of Gaim are still kind of fidgety --
also, make sure you haven't told Gaim to connect through some proxy server you aren't using, or if you are using a proxy server, you have to configure Gaim accordingly.

Just so you know.

We had some issues getting pidgin to run, when we run the configure script:

which is emberessing to me because I already posted in another forum that we had that problem solved...which I thought it was because we were able to run other configure scripts.

Very confusing, but either way, we know that pidgin still spits that error out, while other programs (ndiswrapper for one) are able to compile from source.

New Question:

Why is pidgin telling us "C compiler cannot create executables", and other configure scripts are not? How can we fix this? The way I thought we solved it before was by installing g++ (which google searches reported to be the problem) and glibc-devel package from apt.