Wireless Issues and Wicd

I've noticed that the wireless on the Dell Mini 10 (1010, not 10v) is flaky under Gnome's default NetworkManager, frequently dropping connections and requiring a reset of the daemon or full reboot before a connection will be successfully established. As an effective alternative, a program called wicd is available in the repositories, and I've found it to be much more reliable and flexible.

It is an older wireless manager, and works through a the hardware abstraction layer a bit differenetly than NetworkManager, so some network-centric tools might not work under it.

Instuctions for installing and configuring it are below.

Run the following at the prompt:
Now that it is started, it can be configured either through a terminal by running wicd-curses or through your graphical frontend by running wicd-client (which can either be launched from the terminal or found in Gnome under Applications -> Internet), which displays a status icon on the panel. After being installed, it should start the daemon when the machine starts, but if you want the panel icon to be persistent across sessions, create a file inside ~/.config with the following contents.