My main laptop has a rather dodgy wired network card, it no longer grips the cable properly which leads to frequent disconnections (and no, it's not the cable, it's definitely the card). So, I figured it was time to get wireless configured as nicely as Ubuntu does it.

Turns out it's actually quite easy if you know what you're doing, but it could be made easier for those who don't. My main complaint is the process involves a scary time with no network access until you've rebooted.

Personally I'd like to see network-manager-gnome installed and enabled by default for laptops, but we'd then need to consider adding the initial (and future) users to the netdev group (or maybe we could hack it to use sudo whenever changes are made?)

So, with that in mind we cross our fingers and start reconfiguring the system.

aptitude install network-manager network-manager-gnome

allowing it to add and remove other packages necessary to run.

Then we need to add our users to the netdev group in order to allow them to change networks.

Since we're now using a different dhcp client, we might want to make changes to /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf. I opted to set the hostname, so that our home router knows who I am.

And finally we need to reboot. Yes I know this is linux and we should never need to reboot, but it really is the easiest option - and this being a laptop you really shouldn't lose much by doing so.

Logging back into Gnome gives us an extra icon in the systray allowing us to switch networks. And doing so has now given a nice stable wireless network connection, although with the WAP currently one foot from the laptop shouldn't it be a stronger signal than 82%?