madwifi under debian sarge smc wireless card not working!
 

i have a laptop running debian sarge 2.4.27 (i686) and an smc wcb-g (recognized as an atheros ethernet controller when lspci is ran) and i installed madwifi and everything went perfectly, the card was recognized when i ran the modprobe ath_pci command, and when running dmesg, i could see the card and its specs and it was placed under the module ath0. so i went to network configuration and set up a connection on ath0, but when i got to the end, the network manager froze. so i rebooted, and upon reboot, the verbose boot said that it couldnt find ath0, and i reinstalled the final package in the madwifi instruction sheet for debian (marlow.dk/site.php/tech/madwifi) and tried the modprobe ath_pci again, but the card was not recognized, and the ath0 interface has ceased to exist. sorry if this is a stupid question, im a linux noob, and i dont know what is happening and i feel like im really close to getting this working. any help would be appreciated!
--andrew