Problem setting up wired networking

[Timothy Murphy]

Anne Wilson wrote:

> I have used Mandriva (2009 at present), Xandros and Linpus Lite on roaming
> laptops, and every one of them manages wireless networks without a
> problem.

To be honest, NM works better for me under Fedora-10 than Fedora-9
on a Thinkpad T43.

But occasionally it does not work, and then I find the messages I read
in /var/log/messages completely unintelligible and unhelpful.
I've simply found as a matter of experiment
that I have to re-boot the machine, and then it will probably work,
with probability 0.8 .

But I don't think computing should be a matter of 
experiment and probability.

What I would like is a message along the following lines:
"We connected to the AP, but your DHCP request was rejected", or
"We are unable to initialize your WiFi card".

Something, in other words, that might help me to correct the problem.

Incidentally, Anne mentioned Xandros.
I'm really embarrassed that my grand-daughter's EeePC 4G
(ie the cheapest of the cheap) running Xandros
connects faultlessly to WiFi wherever she is.
I wonder what WiFi program that uses?
(She is in Australia at the moment, so I cannot examine the machine.)