I'm using the TP-Link TL-WN7200ND USB wireless adapter. I have downloaded the Windows drivers and updated Ubuntu to 10.10 by manually connecting the computer to the router. I also installed ndiswrapper-gtk. I get a Windows Wireless Drivers in my Administration menu, and I was able to get it to read the Windows 7 .inf file. The .inf for XP does not work. It adds it and the driver appears in the list with "Hardware: present". I set up the wireless connection information (ESSID and WPA2-Personal key).

Problem: I don't see the network manager icon in the top right of the screen. I managed to manually start it manually using sudo services network-manager restart but it shows no connections in the menu, saying that there's nothing to manage. In my /etc/network/interfaces file I have an entry for the loopback and the standard two-liner for eth0 with dhcp. From memory, something like:

iface eth0
auto eth0 dhcp

I had read somewhere that 10.10 would have standard support for my wireless adapter (TL-WN7200ND) but that seems not to be the case. However, I don't ever remember having the network-manager icon in the top-right and it does not auto-start at the moment. This was originally an Ubuntu 9.10 install that I've upgraded over time. I also used to use pppoeconf to connect to the net, which might affect the /etc/network/interfaces file?