[ILUG] Ubuntu Intrepid networking

[Lars Hecking]

 Intrepid is a bleeding disaster, I cannot believe how many things broke with
 the upgrade from Hardy.

 Clawing my way back up, I'm nearly there, but two issues remain:

 - The 3Com Cyclone PC card I need to use (this is a very old laptop ...)
   always comes up half-duplex; how do I force it to full?

 - Got rid of wpa_supplicant and successfully configured the D-Link WNA 2320
   card with network manager. Problem is, I need to manually modprobe the ath5k
   driver to activate the connection, how can I automate that? I thought hald
   or udev would do that for me?

 Another minor annoyance is that the gnome desktop doesn't return to the
 previous session - the Preferences/Session/Remember Currently Running
 Application setting doesn't seem to do anyhthing.