CentOS and wireless, oh my

[m.roth at 5-cent.us]

So, at home, I'm finally going up from opensuse 10.3 to CentOS 5.3. With
opensuse 10.3, two years old, yast had utterly no trouble configuring my
wireless card, with the madwifi driver, and handling WPA.

I can't find a way using any script or gui to configure this in CentOS. So
I googled. I finally find I have to run wpa_supplicant, though it's not
clear if before or after I run ifup wlan0.

HOWEVER, it's supposed to run as a daemon, I gather. Nope. I run it, and
it apparently crashes. Nothing showing with ps -ef, and in spite of -dd,
nothing in /var/log.

Clues for the incredibly irritated?

       mark