My primary laptop’s wireless card uses the Atheros chipset, so I’ve been battling with the stock Madwifi drivers shipped with Dapper. Using NetworkManager, I get those fscking connection lags while it scans. Of course the newer Madwifi drivers don’t have those issues, and they are shipped with Dapper. However, wpasupplicant and NetworkManager have to be tweaked and recompiled to make use of the new drivers. I had been doing that manually but it’s a bit of a PITA the way I was approaching it.

I’ve been using the linux2go repo for a while for their NetworkManager vpn plugins, but I realized tonight they have madwifi-ng and wpasupplicant debs as well. The really cool part is that their setup uses some udev voodoo to load the new-ath-pci instead of ath-pci, and adds the pci id’s so new- works correctly. All I had to do was add 'deb http://www.linux2go.dk/ubuntu dapper main‘ to /etc/apt/sources.list, run ‘apt-get update; apt-get upgrade; apt-get install madwifi-ng-default; modprobe -r ath_pci; modprobe ath-pci' and voila!

Kudos to linux2go!