The first day working with Ubuntu in the business lounge after my first class meeting. I am attempting to get the wifi up and running. For the moment, I have been customizing various effects with the system in an attempt to make it feel more personal and less out of the box. My first impressions dealing with items like screen savers and backgrounds is that Ubuntu assumes that you have a decent 3D accelerator. For the moment, I am using an array of flashing blue cubes that my ATI 8MB can seem to agree with. Once the wireless is set up I can begin to setup my Gmail account and other Internet related functions. I am curious to see how well Flash related Internet sites will function and to what degree of support I will receive with plug-ins. The pre-installed SoftPhone program has caught my attention and I may choose to monkey with it later. I would also be relieved to find some sort of chess or related game to pass some time between classes. Hopefully the package manager will provide some insight to that. This directly reliant upon the Internet connection I currently do not have.

From my guesses, The card is active and installed correctly. The network manager utility is telling me that the connection is “disconnected”, yet it never gives me the option to add a new network to connect to. Dr. Verma told me that I could use a utility called “wifi radar” to aid in the process of selecting a wireless network. Yet this program needs a wireless connection to download. I may have to find the CAT cable in the advanced micro lounge and get this solved.