Hello all,

I'm a newbie to Debian (just installed it today), but I've run SuSE Linux
for about seven years. SuSE has let me down in the wireless networking
department, so I decided to give Debian a try.

I installed Debian and, of course, quickly discovered that not much of
anything was installed. One thing I did notice, though, was that when it
was time for me to configure networking, Debian didn't seem to even know
that my (PCI) wireless card existed. So I didn't have a connection to the
Internet, which in itself was no big deal.

The card is in /proc/pci with interrupt 10, but there's no interface for
it. I felt rather lost at the command line, since I don't know my way
around Debian, so I went ahead and installed X and got that going (I also
have keyboard issues, but I'll deal with that later; and was very pleased
that it defaults to Gnome rather than KDE, but anyway) and tried the
Networking tool under System Administration, but when I added a wireless
interface in there, I couldn't activate it, and sometimes the Networking
tool would freeze when I tried.

So what the heck do I need to do to get a working wireless network
interface in Debian?

PS I managed to run "make xconfig" just to see what was already
configured, and yes, wireless networking is configured in the kernel.
However, I didn't see support for my chipset (Atheros). Perhaps I should
move up from the default 2.4.27 kernel to a 2.6 kernel?

Best,
Tim