Connecting to an Unsecured Wireless Network in Ubuntu

aka, Help Omni with Ubuntu, part 2.

I have tried for weeks to get Ubuntu to connect to a unsecured wireless network and have had no luck in doing so. Using the Network Manager, I am able to connect onto my home router with WPA-TKIP encryption fine, but it seems that when I go to class and the network is unsecured, I have trouble connecting to it. I have looked up google already, but all I see is everybody else with the same problem without a solution in sight. I have tried other network managers as well. SWScanner said that the scanning operation was not supported and it could not see any wireless signals. I then tried Wicd, which I have not yet got to load up after installation.

This is actually getting quite annoying because I cannot use Ubuntu in class if I need to access the internet, which means I have to constantly switch back and forth between the two. Actually, at this point, I could just stay on Windows, because the professor does not require Ubuntu in class.

Never mind, apparently, you have to use WEP Encryption (ascii) with an empty password. Seems pretty counter intuitive to me, but hey, whatever.
The following problem still persists though.

Oh, and on the side note, there is another thing that is slowly starting to annoy me. I am not sure if you can tell in this post, but some of my keys do not work the way they are supposed to. Specifically, the apostrophe. I keep getting colons with it. Using it with Shift gives me an asterisk. The Semicolon still works fine, but using shift with it gives me a + sign. Outside of those, a lot of my other punctuation keys are screwed up. The alphabetic keys still work fine.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Is the keymap problem only in X or also on the console (not xterm)?

You can use loadkeys to change the keymap for the kernel layer, this should affect the console. See /usr/share/keymaps/ for all the possible keymaps available. Yours is probably in i386.

X uses a different key translation table, so it won't be influenced by any changes done with loadkeys. You can edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf for that (look for Xkb settings) or search in /etc/hal/fdi if your X input stuff is "automagically" configure by HAL/DBUS.

@Network manager: The tool is crap IMHO. You might wanna take a look at wpa_supplicant, pretty mighty. Can access an open network without problems (and not with this weird config type you mentioned). Also support WEP, WPA1 and WPA2 (in its different modes).

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Thanks, I found the issue. For some reason the default was the Japanese keyboard layout? Either way, fixed it easily.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.