[ale] atheros 802.11g/b/a

[Jim Popovitch]

I have a problem with the atheros card in my laptop.  First, I must say
that atheros is a pain in the ass card to work with.  It requires
madwifi which eventually gives you two stupid interfaces wifi0 and ath0.
Why it does this is unknown to me.... but anyone who has ever dealt with
networking typically thinks of one interface per connection (i.e. eth0,
tap0, vlan0, etc.)  Frustration makes me think that the designers were
drunk or high when they designed this (feel free to clue me in on what I
am missing wrt this).

Anyway, here's my problem:  I'd like to use my wifi card at home with
54mbps ap (linksys wrt54g), but I also need to use this card at work,
hotspots, etc., places that are likely to be running 802.11b networks
(11mbps).  The problem is that the atheros piece of crap needs me to
specify the mode in order to connect to an ap.  So at home I have to do
this:
    "iwpriv ath0 mode 3"  <-- 802.11g
or at work:
    "iwpriv ath0 mode 2"  <-- 802.11b

iwpriv docs say that mode 0 should be for a/b/g, but 0 doesn't work and
the atheros card fails to connect to the ap.  Using mode 2 or 3 does
work, but then it's a pain to manually mess with /etc/network/interface
settings everytime I change to a different ap.

Any ideas on what to do other than buying a better wifi card?

Thanks,

-Jim P.