After several months of frustration with NetworkManager I took the plunge and installed Wicd. I'm not dissing NM but it obvously didn't like my laptop because it kept dropping the connection. For anyone who is having an unhappy experience with the default network manager in Ubuntu 9.10, there is an alternative in the repositories and it rocks.
Also of interest, Wicd 1.7.0 was released a short while ago. If you have Karmic, you can get it using this PPA: https://launchpad.net/~mgerdin/ archive/ppa/ packages
To install the default repository version just open a terminal and run: Code: sudo apt-get install wicd To install 1.7, run these commands: Code: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mgerdin/ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install wicd