The other day I was curious to see what the hype was about Ubuntu. So I downloaded Ubuntu desktop and installed it on my Toshiba Tecra M2 laptop with nVidia display card and Atheros Wifi. I have previously installed Fedora, RedHat, SuSE, OpenSuSE with absolutely no issues with display driver and expected the same from Ubuntu. To my surprise the only way I could login to this system was in single user mode. Xserver just would not come up because of missing driver. I understand that nVidia is not an open source product and needs to be explicitly downloaded and installed. So how on earth does one go about doing this when all you have is a secured Wifi network (which I presume is the case in most homes).
Yes this was my biggest problem. I searched all the support aliases, Ubuntu FAQs, and other resources, but did not find a simple script that allowed me to connect online to Wifi network using command line. So here I am putting what I struggled for over two days to configure. I hope this helps some folks out there having similar problems.
sudo ifdown eth0
sudo ifdown ath0
sudo iwconfig ath0 mode managed
sudo iwconfig ath0 channel 11
sudo iwconfig ath0 essid <Your ESSID>
sudo iwconfig ath0 key <Your Security Key> (Leave blank if this is an open unsecured network)
sudo ifup ath0
sudo ifconfig ath0
Once you connect to your Wifi network, you can now download one of the nVidia drivers depending on the version of display card you have. You can find details on how to get the version of your display at Ubunty FAQ. Once you get your driver installed you can now login using GNOME or KDE which ever you've installed.
