Reinstall ubuntu 8.04

I've used ubuntu for about a year now (started in August 2007), and despite minor annoyances and problems I've really come to like the OS.
However, in September 2008 I fucked up my system for good. I installed wicd, an alternate network manager for linux, because my wireless internet card didn't want to play and after that, my Maple and Maxima install didn't work. I tried to remove wicd and reinstall network-manager again, which only made things a lot worse; I wasn't able to access the graphical interface (X11). So I removed network-manager and reinstalled wicd using the terminal. Still not able to get Maple or Maxima going, though. I'm currently using Maple in a university course and really needed it to work. Sure, I could access the server at my university via ssh and feed Maple through that, but that was excruciatingly slow and painful. So I finally decided to make a fresh installation of ubuntu 8.04.

This blog serves as a walk through. I'll document all the things I configure in my ubuntu install, so I'll be able to return to this blog later when similar problems arises. It'll probably only be useful to me, but I'm putting it out on the internet so other people can use it too.