soaked and soaped

Yesterday I tried to connect my notebook (running Ubuntu) to the wireless network at my girlfriend’s home — for nothing.
It didn’t work.

The network was secured with WPA and my Ubuntu Edgy was not able to connect to WPA protected networks out of the box.
I knew there is the tool named network manager, but I already tried to work with it some month ago – and I had no positive experience with.

While searching in the Ubuntu forums for a solution I found a new tool called Wicd (spoken: wicked).

With Wicd, your notebook connects to wireless networks at boot and has the ability to connect to most commonly used encryption systems like WEP, WPA 1/2 and a lot more.

Currently it is under heavy development, but it sounds promising and it already works very nice.