Networking :: Ath9k Driver Installation With Source From Kernels For 2.6.34 ?

I have had some trouble with understanding the wireless drivers. I am using backtrack 4 R1, and the reason was merely for the network and having many necessary networking dependencies already there. However I found that I am using a HAL for the ath9k and madwifi-ng drivers, thus I must patch the card and go through all of that.

The specific distribution I am using is Backtrack 4 R1 with KDE3 and ubuntu on the 2.6.34 kernel. I know I have through an update script found the wireless drivers and downloaded them, however all attempts to get it to fully work haven't helped. I checked the forums, and it doesn't seem like they consider it a backtrack specific question but a linux specific question. I performed hwinfo and it returns ath9k and the memory address, channels 1-14, wlan frequencies(2.412,2.417, 2.422, 2.427, 2.432, 2.437, 2.442, 2.447, 2.452, 2.457, 2.462, 2.467, 2.472, 2.484. I have all modes of encryption set.

I am using both ifconfig and iwconfig with a wicd frontend to access the network typically. Unfortunately I am only seeing a wlan0 and no ath0. Furthermore, I manually issue these commands I am doing so I set each aspect of the card up (i.e essid, channel, mtu, fragmentation, etc....).

Now I did shed some light upon this in the sense that I found out how to initialize the madwifi-ng hal abstraction layer via 'start airmon-ng wlan0' and then it returns.....

mon0 ath9k py0 etc. etc. etc.( this isn't exact I am unfortunately not at my computer. But the device is then able to work, however I am not sure as to why I am not able to have the ath0 device in my wireless devices if indeed everything else appears to be ath0.