Wireless network connection of a Dell Inspiron 530 with Ubuntu 8.04

Recently I bought an Desktop PC Inspiron 530 from Dell with Ubuntu 7.10 pre-installed to replace the very old Window PC that my parents used. I immediately upgraded the system to Ubuntu 8.04 and installed a subset of the additional software mentioned in my last post.

In addition to this, I wanted to use a wireless network connection to avoid cables from the router to the PC (both are in different rooms). Therefore I bought a Belkin Wireless G USB Network Adapter F5D7050 v4002 uk (USB ID 050d:705c) together with the Dell PC. It was disappointing that the included documentation only explained how to install and use the Network Adapter in a Mircrosoft environment, so that I had to search the Web about how to install wireless network adapters in Ubuntu. I found links such as https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WiFiHowTo, http://linuxwiki.de/LinuxWireless or http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/WLAN. According to these pages, wireless still isn't always trivial using Linux and therefore I expected that command line editing and adjusting of configuration files would be required. I was very positively surprised, that instead of that, this Belkin Network Adapter worked right out of the box together with the GNOME Network Manager. I tested WPA (TKIP) encryption connected to my Speedport W 701V as well connection without encryption to a Fonera (see also https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported#preview). The GNOME Network Manager provides pain-free networking as expected if somebody is used to wireless tools from Windows or Mac OS X. The only function I was missing was the GNOME Network remembering wireless networks with invisible SSID's. Instead of that I either had to make the SSID visible or - if the SSID is invisible - to be forced to connect manually each time via "Connect to other wireless network".

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