So I've looked at this question, and this question. I've also sought wisdom from the almighty DuckDuckGo and Google.
I've used the command line version of connecting to the wifi:
sudo iwconfig wlan0 mode managed key s:mykeythatyoudontknow essid myessid
Using a variety of different methods (adding quotes to myessid, adding the info to /etc/network/interfaces, using wpa_supplicant)
but the problem still remains - I can connect perfectly fine using nm-applet. When I was visiting relatives they had their network secured with WPA, and I could connect to that. At home I "secure" mine with WEP (I figure anyone who wants to use my bandwidth bad enough to crack my PW is welcome to it). I even tried turning off the network security in hopes that the issue might be related, but it doesn't seem to be.
I can connect to the network using nm-applet just fine. But the problem is that I don't want to use nm-applet. First, I would like to have my wifi start up when I boot my computer. Second, this system isn't the most robust and I'm a command line geek anyway so I'd prefer to just do all/most of my work without even starting X.
I have another laptop which I've been able to connect to my wifi just fine with iwconfig (though I never tried wpa_supplicant, and that laptop has some pretty bad issues).
That's a bit of a roundabout way to ask what I did in the title - why can I connect to my networks using nm-applet, but not with the command line? And more importantly, how can I fix it?
Output of lspci | grep Network:
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
Output of iwconfig wlan0 when connected via nm-applet:
wlan0 IEEE 802.11abg ESSID:"wayne"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: 00:14:BF:AD:5C:23
Bit Rate=54 Mb/s Tx-Power=15 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=53/70 Signal level=-57 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0
On Ubuntu 10.10.
