If you're ready to "go to XP", then go, don't cry about it. If you want help instead, it's all right too.
#1 Ubuntu's default network manager is just fine, if it can't show the networks, it's no use removing it and installing some other tool - as far as I know, they're all merely front-ends to the wireless-tools (iwlist, iwconfig, ...) so you can safely use the default network manager to first get things running - if you want to change it for some reason, you can do so afterwards. I found Ubuntu's network manager (or rather the applet) very nice compared to the other solutions.
#2 Determine your wireless device. If you have wired device, it's usually called eth0 so your wireless is then usually either eth1 or wlan0 depending on how your machine is configured. Both are just fine (some people seem to think "eth1" is wrong, but it's not). After you know it (or just guess, it's all the same), try running
and see the results - if that tells you your device "does not support scanning", but you know it does, it's a problem with the driver. If it just tells you there is nothing out there, your driver is (or should be) working fine, and you can leave that out of the inspection.
#3 If the above told you your device (TRY BOTH eth1 AND wlan0 TO MAKE SURE YOU'RE WORKING WITH THE CORRECT DEVICE) doesn't support scanning, start thinking what driver you're using. Maybe
Code:
dmesg | grep wire
lsmod
helps - try to figure out what the card chipset is -> what driver (module) it uses, and if that module is loaded. If not, load it and retry, but if it is loaded, things look like the driver doesn't work.
#4 If the native driver doesn't just work out (note: if it has worked once, then don't go about trying other drivers, it's no use), as a final move you can resort to (or try to) NDISwrapper. It's a program you can use to use Windows drivers for your card instead; that's what the name says. There are numerous howtos about ndiswrapper installation and 96% of them work on every distribution in addition to the one they're written for, so don't ask, search them. It's not as good choice as a native driver, it's just as good as using XP would be. If you're fine with that, go there.
#5 If you think the driver is loaded and working, next step is to inspect your settings. Did "iwlist eth1(/wlan0) scan" give any results? If it did, try to connect to some ESSID. Maybe it's the user/pass values, or security settings - have you configured WPA if it's used?
#6 There are n.u.m.e.r.o.u.s. howtos for Ubuntu (and even more for other distributions that may work just as well) about this, about problem situations, about your specific card and about your bad monday too. Read them trough, carefully, thinking about the matter in hand rather than just "being ready to go to XP".
You can probably setup your connection after the reboot too, that's just the sequence I used and it worked.
timcrace
