setting up wpa on wireless ??
 

I installed debian lenny on a toshiba laptop for a someone.Got it all set up except for the last thing..wireless..After install I opened kde network manager and it showed a wireless entry,,wlan0..I did lspci..and it showed it as a Antheros device..I googled it and started reading about madwifi drivers for this chip..so I looked in synaptic and installed the packages madwifi tools and source..I rebooted and when I looked at network manager it was gone..So I uninstalled what i had instlled and rebooted ..but it stil didnt show any wireless device in Kde network manager..so after a bit of googling i installed madwifi from tutorial that used module-assistant to build it..rebooted..and there was a new entry in kde network manager..ath0...Question is..did I even need to install madwifi drivers.??.Kde had it recognized as wlan0...so the kernel had drivers for it?.Wouldnt it have still worked??thats was main question,,other is about wpa..is it just a matter of adding essid and wpa_psk to /etc/network/interfaces..??

About your first questions about drivers, I'd say no more need to deal wid madwifi. You WLAN card is detected and is in use. You just need to config WPA. WPA personal need only one key/pass. I'm using it on fedora so I don't know how to deal with debian...

I am using Lenny as well. I don't know about KDE, usually Gnome network manager automatically does the connection for me. But if it doesn't work, you may try it manually (I have done this for quite a long time before I knew Gnome does the same thing for me:))

create a file :
/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

add:

ctrl_interface=/var/run/wpa_supplicant
ctrl_interface_group=root
network={
ssid="[your id]"
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
psk="[your password]"
}

then,

sudo ifdown wlan0
sudo pkill wpa_supplicant

sudo wpa_supplicant -B -iwlan0 -c/etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

sudo ifup wlan0

I used wicd to configure my atheros card and WPA2 in Debian Lenny after removing network-manager. Worked great !!