After about my third Windows reboot this week I got fed up and decided to have another go at Linux on my laptop. I downloaded the ISO for Ubuntu desktop 6.10 and everything just seems to work.

The one hassle I’ve run into is WPA authentication with my home wireless network (Linksys WRT54G). I discovered that you can put the following into /etc/network/interfaces and have wpa_supplicant start automatically:

iface eth1 inet dhcp
  wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Here’s the contents of /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
network={
  ssid="<HOME SSID>"
  key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
  proto=WPA
  pairwise=TKIP
  group=TKIP
  psk="<SECRET PASSWORD>"
}