I bought a laptop recently, that had a Atheros built-in wireless card, installed Derian(sarge) and madwifi. modprobe and ifconfig are going smooth but still when it comes to the scanning network the card says no reselts found. What should I do to make it work?

You may need to make sure it's got the correct network type(iwpriv ath0 mode X, iwpriv ath0 will show you all the possible private ioctls to set on the card)

If the AP you're trying to access is secured well enough, scanning may not work unless you're mac authorized, or you know the SSID or WEP/WPA key.

Make sure you're scanning correctly, iwlist ath0 scan

check your kernel logs to see if you're getting issues with the card itself, my EPIA system had to have memory reserved for the card to work, that took about 2 weeks of google hunting.

I set mode to 0 so it will detect automatically, and there is no super secured network - the router is right next to me and I unchecked the MAC authorization.SSID and WAP keys are fine.

BTW, you mentioned memory problem, could you please describe it in details and your solution.

Basically my PCMCIA card would appear as though it loaded and worked, but dmesg proved otherwise. It couldn't apply power to the card due to the card reporting to ACPI it wanted to use memory that had already been reserved for shared video. I had to append a reserve= option to my kernel to force the system to ignore that area of RAM and everything works fine.