What I Learned from Breaking My Wifi Setup

Folks, this is a cautionary tale of why we must always always be careful about upgrading software. I was too much in a hurry to upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3 already so I didn’t have wifi this morning. I followed the instructions to upgrade to OpenOffice.org 3 for Ubuntu 8.10 on softpedia.com yesterday. I forgot that I installed madwifi for Ubuntu UMPC (based on Ubuntu 8.10).

My lessons:

• Think about anything you’ve installed that came from sources outside the Ubuntu repositories. Is there anything critical like the wifi driver?
• Don’t just follow instructions without checking for any sentences that tell you the caveat/s of what you’re going to do.
• As a follow up to the previous item, if you don’t see any caveat/s, look for them first elsewhere. You don’t have to follow the first or second article you come across.
• Read as much as you can even when you are desperate or want something done quickly. It won’t be as painful to undo later on.
• Ask for help if you’re very unsure about what to do about it. Sometimes you can’t do everything by yourself. I had to go somewhere this morning so I asked the sys ad to help me out.