wireless problem

Hello !

When in Ubuntu, you should see a network icon somewhere in the upper-right corner (looks like some screen, possibly with a red cross near it). You should single-left-click and select something like "Wireless Network" ... then it will try to connect and get an IP from the router ... Then that should work ...

Hope this helps !

Regards,
Benoît

thank you benoit, but unfortunately it didn't quite do the trick.
here's what happened this time (sorry for the brief description last night as i was a bit tired and frustrated)...

i left clicked on the nm icon to the right of the upper menu bar and it gave a list of wireless sources. i clicked on the one i typically use and it did its little animation while trying to connect. it failed to connect twice so i dissabled roaming and opted to manually enter in the info. i entered the essid name, left the password blank as it is not using wep, then under connection settings set it as dhcp and hit ok. after this it no longer showed the wirless at all and switched to 'wired connection' (which i am sadly without). i changed it back to roaming, left clicked the nm icon and selected my wirless source and the icon changed from the two screens with a red 'X' to signal strength bars. then when i right clicked on it and selected 'connection info' it had all my ip's listed as zeros... it listed the interface/speed/driver correctly but the ip's were sadly vacant. and yet when i mouse overed the nm icon a pop up would state 'wireless network connected to "linksys" (62%)'...

for some reason it is recognising my wireless sources but unable to aquire an ip. any ideas?

Well Lets see Jon. You should look to see if your friend has a password if he does and you have it make sure you select paraphrase for a word of phrase or Hex for a number.
The other option is to manualy asign a Network address. But you may need a scanner for that. There are some great tutorials on Network scanning and how wireless networks work.
I think your best bet is to learn how to manualy set your Wireless connection settings.
If you go here you will need a wired connection to do this. http://www.debianadmin.com/enable-wpa-wireless-access-point-in-ubuntu-linux.html
On the other hand if you don't have his password you could do this Still need a wired connection to get the tools(you don't really need them but the other way is much harder)
http://cri.ch/linux/docs/sk0016.html

The last thing is that for some odd reason Ubuntu isn't letting your wireless card work at its best. You may need a new driver. Or the walls in your house are cutting the connection.

Thanks,
    John W. Mulholland