On a whim I decided to upgrade from Ubuntu 8.04 LTS to Ubuntu 8.10 on my Acer Aspire 5920 laptop. Mostly it went smooth but I had two problems.

First, Macromedia wouldn't respond when it tried to download the Flash plugin. Unfortunately the installer wouldn't give up and after 19 automatic retries to connect to fpdownload.macromedia.com (each taking 3 minutes) I finally hit CTRL-C and killed it. After the upgrade I had to open a console and "sudo dpkg --configure -a" to finish the setup and then reboot. What's weird is that Flash still worked after the failed install.

Upon reboot, my wireless wouldn't work. The network manager applet wouldn't even show in the panel. Doing ifconfig from a console showed the wlan0 device but nothing would bring it online. I fished my 30' long network cable out of the closet that I use for these circumstances and hardwired my laptop to the router.

A little research found that some people having this problem manually downloaded linux-firmware from the repositories and reinstalled it. After download, from within the directory where the .deb file is located simply do:

dpkg --install linux-firmware*

After that, I rebooted and my wireless asked for my wep password again. All is well in the world.