Dear lazyweb,

I’m at a loss. For some reason, I can’t connect to wireless spots in two locations now in Hurghada, when I’m booted into my Ubuntu partition.

Network Manager can see the networks, can see they’re not encrypted and can try to connect to them. And then… nothing!

At first I put this down to a rare fault my install shows occasionally of struggling to connect to a different Wireless network if it was shut down whilst connected to another, and tried the standard approach of an extra restart to solve the problem (it’s a grumble, but a minor one). But, alas! It wasn’t to be. Rebooting went fine, again the networks showed, and again it wouldn’t connect. I tried moving seats to be closer to the Access Point, but still, nothing.

I can’t get my head around it. I can travel to other places and be able to connect quickly and easily, as usual, to other open networks, but for some reason in these two locations it won’t connect. Rebooting into Mac OS X solves the problem and it connects straight away.

Is it possible that certain Access Points can be configured to allow access only to Mac / Windows Operating Systems? I don’t know, I’m just curious. Is it something to do with the way Linux handles the network handshaking (I find this unlikely as OS X is Unix-based and, I would imagine, handles these things similarly, although I’m in no way remotely expert in the field!).
Is it some sort of problem with my specific Network-Manager / Ubuntu build, or the PPC build in general? (For the record I’m running Ubuntu 6.10 PPC edition.)

I don’t have the first glimpse of a thought on what could cause this, or why, so if anyone has suffered similar or can provide a reason it’d be much appreciated, even if I’m incapable of fixing it

Cheers