It Works, Then It Doesn't -- TWICE

The old Omnibook 4150 (P-III, 650 mhz 256 RAM) had a copy of SimplyMEPIS 6.0 on it and 6.5 was out. There was not a clear upgrade path, so a wipe and reinstall was in order. I downloaded and burned the iso file and booted the trusty old girl up with the new CD. in about 20 minutes I had a pretty KDE desktop...but my wireless card (based on the TI ACX100 chipset) was not working...it did in 6.0, but not in 6.5. I searched and searched and found lots of ideas but none of them worked. Sign. I read that Ubuntu has support for this card "right out of the box" so I installed Ubuntu (normally my favorite distro) 6.10 on her. The wireless card worked perfectly. I play a while and I am happy.

I then read that the newest version of Ubuntu (7.04) is in beta and is scheduled to be released in a few days, so I did the "safe" upgrade from Edgy to Feisty (sudo update-manager -c -d) and about an hour later I have the newest version of Ubuntu. Wireless works perfectly. I shut the PC down and go to bed. I get up and turn on the laptop and check my mail (wirelessly) with no issues. I start cleaning house. I stop to check my e-mail, and the card is not recognized. WHAT? I reboot, thinking something went crazy on boot (this card is notorious for acting flaky) and it still did not work. Grrr. I go back to cleaning my office constantly reminded that my laptop is useless without wireless (money is tight...I can't get another card right now). After lunch I give it another shot and got it to work by using this. When I was done, it worked. Yay!

I surfed the web for a few minutes and was very happy when I noticed there were updates. I took the updates and BAM, my wireless card stopped working. Well, I went back to the drawing board and tried the build and install from this page, but no dice. It would not connect to the router at all. It detected the card, but that was about all.

Right now I am installing a fresh Debian install (I should give Mepis one more try) to see what happens. I know I am going to have to do a lot of work, but it would be nice to see it work when I am done!