anyone have an Acer TravelMate notebook or anything with an Atheros wifi chip?

[Lonni J Friedman]

I just purchased an Acer TravelMate 2480 notebook, after researching
it and reading many reports that it works well in Linux.  That seems
to be true, up until I attempt to do anything with the built-in
wireless device.

Its got an Atheros chipset based device, which identifies itself in lspci as:

Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5006EG 802.11 b/g
Wireless PCI Express Adapter (rev 01)  168c:001c

I've installed Fedora 8-x86, with all updates, and then installed
madwifi-0.9.4 from the ATrpms yum repo.  I blacklisted the ath5k
driver in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.  Unfortunately, all attempts to
configure the ath0 interface are failing.  In dmesg I'm seeing:

ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel.
ath_hal: 0.9.30.13 (AR5210, AR5211, AR5212, AR5416, RF5111, RF5112,
RF2413, RF5413, RF2133)
ath_pci: 0.9.4.5 (0.9.4)
PCI: Enabling device 0000:03:00.0 (0000 -> 0002)
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:03:00.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:03:00.0 to 64
MadWifi: unable to attach hardware: 'Hardware revision not supported'
(HAL status 13)
ACPI: PCI interrupt for device 0000:03:00.0 disabled

To say the least, that isn't promising.

I attempted to fall back to using the ath5k driver (after
unblacklisting it), but that one isn't working either.  It detects the
device ok, but any attempts to bring up an interface fail.  I've got
several other systems on the same wireless network that aren't having
any issues, so I'm fairly confident its not the network.

Note, all of the above is before even attempting to use any form of
encryption.  I want to get the thing functional to the point that I
can ping other systems, and then I'll add in encryption.

Anyone have any success stories or suggestions?  thanks