I installed wheezy on my Acer Aspire One netbook and am unable to connect to wireless networks.

Output of lspci shows this as my wireless card:

I installed the firmware-atheros package to get the card up and running. Output of iwconfig shows I have a working interface:

I am using network-manager-gnome to handle wireless networks. It shows all available wireless networks I can connect to, but when I click on a network to connect, nothing happens.

Running nm-applet from the terminal is a giant mess:

I get this output when I select a wireless network to connect to:

I tried using wicd instead, but it won't even detect wireless networks.

Did the iwconfig command show you an IP address? What happens when you issue the command
as root from a terminal?

No IP address with iwconfig.

output of iwconfig wlan0 up:

Okay, got wicd to detect wireless networks, but it won't let me connect to my home network, insisting I entered a bad password, which is certainly not the case. I disabled security on my wireless network, but it still insisted I entered a bad password, even though it lists my network as unsecured...

Apologies, my bad... Tryinstead...

That doesn't look good.

Indeed. It means your wireless is not recognised. Perhaps the driver module for the chipset isn't loaded into the kernel. What doestell you? (this command lists all loaded modules, then pipes it through grep to find the search-string *theros, meaning theros with any character in front (* denominates a wild-card))

The above command outputs nothing. I tried just lsmod and hunted for atheros drivers; here's what I found--

Since I have no solution to the above, I would like to focus your attention to some things.

a) The repeated message starting with "GConf Error" is probably a gnome-keyring fault.
b) Wicd allows you to set the wifi interface it will use, here. Set it to wlan0 to be sure it uses it.
Plus, I assume you have the right key configuration here (wep, wpa or wpa2) here.
c) Regarding the "lack" of wlan0 as mentioned on post #6: wicd and network manager DEMAND that /etc/network/interfaces list ONLY configuration for the lo interface, since the rest are handled by them.

What the heck-- wireless worked perfectly when I logged into my root account. Still not working in my normal user account though...

Thunar is having problems mounting external drives-- "Not authorized" or something rather. I think I'm having issues with user permissions.

Open wicd go to "preferences" and enter "wlan0" as the wireless interface - it's almost always blank in my experience.

Then open a terminal, su to root and add your user to the netdev group if you haven't already (I think it does this on package install anyway).

Where "yourusername" is your user name.

You would then need to restart dbus, the wicd daemon and probably the wicd client, so just reboot instead...

I logged out and logged back in as root, made sure "wlan0" was my interface in wicd, and attempted to connect to wireless. wicd still insists I have a bad password, but network manager connects flawlessly. Still no luck as a regular user.

I've no experience with atheros wireless but sometimes you need to provide the hash of the password rather than the password itself... it's worth a try, as I seem to remember at least one NIC I had that wouldn't work any other way.

What authentication are you using? WPA2?

Have you tried just setting up the connection in the interfaces file?

networkmanager usually has an option to make the connection available to all users - it's in the preferences somewhere (more than a year since I've touched it).

I'm using WPA/WPA2. Forgive my ignorance, but what exactly is the "hash" of the passphrase?

The hash is the scrambled password, after it's been coded into something only the rightful recipient can understand, as it has the decoding key. For examples, look no further then the known_hosts file in the .ssh directory.