I recently purchased a netgear 150 usb wireless dongle for use with my 11.10 Xubuntu amd64 system. Using the network-manager interface, I can see local wireless networks and enter the authentication details for my local wireless lan. Unfortunately, the connection does not seem to work, I keep getting notifications that my wireless has disconnected (but none indicating that I've connected). When I examine syslog, it seems to indicate that I've successfully associated with the wireless switch and that dhcp has successfully acquired an ip address but the log shows that the dhcp process keeps sending requests, eventually dropping the connection. 'ifconfig wlan0' never shows the dhcp address logged in syslog.

I suspect that the problem lies with the usb dongle, my configuration or the wireless switch but I am not certain how to isolate the problem, can anyone provide some insight on how I should go about homing in on the cause of this problem or verifying the functionality of the individual components, thanks.