Ubuntu Wirless Nightmare

Well I finished my course work a while ago, instead of turning my attentions back to my development project I decided to spent some time trying to set up Ubuntu. When I intalled my computer the last time, shortly after buying windows vista, I reinstalled XP and added Ubuntu 8.04 to my machine but since I couldn't quickly get the wireless connectivity working I gave up. Now I have spend two long evenings amounting to around eight hours of my time, that could be used much better, failing to get my wireless cards working under Ubuntu. It's quite annoying because I wanted to compare Ubuntu to Windows Vista but without any internet connection it would be pretty pointless and I would be forced to conclude that Windows Vista was massively superior to Ubuntu.

My wireless setup includes one Asus 167-g USB dongle, a Belkin PCI wireless card that doesn't work with Ubuntu without Ndiswrapper. The main router is a BT home hub the 1.5 version and my spare is a 3 com office connect router.

From boot I was able to see my wireless network from the network manager, I was able to click on the network and set my password information, the internet connection I use is encrypted with a 64 bit hex key. Needless to say the connection failed, I decided to try and get the wireless connected to a spare router as other people use the same router for internet accesses and I didn't want to keep repeatable kicking them off. Playing around with the settings I managed to the router to connect with both WPA and no encryption although the connection percentage never quite reached 100% and I couldn't get any kind of connection using WEP. While my other house mates were out I tried fiddling around with the main routers encryption type and I eventually managed to get an intermittent connection which is where I had to leave my attempts.

Searching through the Asus website I found a driver binary for my wireless dongle with some tampering I set up my machine to compile the binaries, sadly the compile failed and I my un informed attempts to fix what was wrong failed. In-between I went through and manually configured my network card which failed to connect. Finally I install WICD which didn't help although why would it. At times I even had problems connecting to my test router. Throughout the process I had numerous periods where I had trouble with my spare router.

I'm hoping that the new Ubuntu release that coming next move will resolve my problems the other solution is to by a new wireless card that is better supported by the operating system although I'm not sure if either of these will help, me on my quest to have a usable Ubuntu operating system.