This is my third attempt at installing Gentoo. This time I decided however that I am not continuing without wifi

I have an Atheros AR9285. Gentoo can't see it

ifconfig -a only shows eth0 and lo (btw eth0 works fine, I just want to get wireless working)

iwconfig only finds lo and eth0, obviously neither have wireless extensions.

there is no button to turn off wifi on my laptop. I currently have crunchbang linux installed and the card works fine in crunchbang.

I have manually loaded the ath9k modules. I don't really see why that would make a difference but I figured someone would probably ask me to do that.

is there some kind of shell acpi command I can issue to make sure the card is turned on?
Or, does anyone have any idea of what might be wrong?

Since 'ifconfig -a' is not showing your wifi device (wlan0) then pretty much your wifi is not started up for some reason. When you modprobe the ath9k driver what is 'dmesg' saying?

I don't have too much experience with Atheros but the following thread seems like is related to your issue. Anyhow, when you load the driver is '/proc/net/wireless' present on the system? If not, then the driver is not doing its job even-though it may be modprobed in.

In the thread posted above the issue is related to gentoo's kernel config, so it is a good idea to re-check that too.

Hope that helps.

/proc/net/wireless exists but there is no devices listed

I examined /proc/config.gz and it doesn't appear that any of the wireless options are set.

is there anyway to either modify this kernel at runtime, or actually recompile it on another linux system so I can run with wireless?

I doubt you can modify the kernel at runtime and it seems gentoo's live cd does not have proper support for your device enabled in the kernel. Anyhow, you can post the output of

so we can know for sure if wifi support for your device is in place or not. If it isn't, then I think it might be better to install gentoo using some other live cd media like system rescue because they have good wifi support and such ...