Whilst I do have a gui manager for networking it is not like the one shown in the link. One clicks on the name of the network shown and a drop down with any other access is shown. I _think_ the the key is WEP simply one word <ultra> I will I try the command line. should that fail I guess I need to install network manager,hopefully I can get it through apt. I did not do this before as I thought it may cause a conflict with the ndis wrapper. Regards John.

What type of encryption is the access point using?

If it's using the (old, insecure) WEP encryption then you should be able to set the key using iwconfig <interface> key s:<password>

The s: tells iwconfig that you're specifying a key in ASCII.

If it's using WPA or WPA2 encryption then you need to be using wpa_supplicant to do the authentication.

In general however, if you're using network manager in Ubuntu (I seem to recall it's not always installed by default?) then you should be able to manage all of this through the GUI without having to even know about wpa_supplicant or bother with the commandline.

My sugguestion for step 1 would be to determine whether you are using network manager to control the wireless. To do this go to http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/, do you have an interface like the screenshot next to the second paragraph titled "Flexible, Extendable, Open" - The dock icon with a dropdown list of networks and signal strength, etc?

-- Matt Brown matt(a)mattb.net.nz Mob +353 86 608 7117 www.mattb.net.nz