How do you get wired and wireless on ubuntu 9.10?

For wireless cards that do not work out of the box, you will need to identify the wireless chipset used. You can do this by running "lspci" in a terminal, and looking for names such as "Broadcom, Realtek, Atmel, etc... Afterwards, you can install a third-party module by connecting via Ethernet and running

sudo apt-get install [package name]

The package you will want to install depends on the chipset.

Atmel - atmel-firmware

Broadcom - bcm43xx-fwcutter