The new version of Ubuntu (called “Dapper”) was released a week or two ago. I held off upgrading because I haven’t even used Linux lately - I’ve been booting directly into XP because that’s where my games and Paint Shop Pro work. But I wanted to see if the Linux alpha version of Second Life ran any better than the Windows version, so I went into Ubuntu. I figured while I was there I might as well upgrade, and I let that run while I was out of the house for most of Saturday.

When I came back, everything had gone smoothly - except the wifi connection didn’t work. So I booted back and forth between Linux and XP, did some research, and asked around in various places. Finally, this afternoon, I got the answer. When I installed Breezy, the previous version of Ubuntu, I had to also install a utility to make the Windows wifi card drivers usable in Linux. Dapper had native support and didn’t require this utility, so it was confused about whether it should use the utility or the native driver. I renamed the native driver, so it would only think to use the utility; after a reboot everything came up working great! I’m back to using Linux for at least a little while, but there’s already a game I wanted to play tonight so I might end up going back to XP in a bit…