For a time I ran Etch on my Inspiron 4100 because I kept having trouble with my wifi card on CentOS. While the Backports site offered a recent kernel for Etch, I missed the RedHat world very much. After doing some research, chasing different references, I found there was a solution. After reinstalling CentOS 5.3, I then added a testing kernel, and it worked much better.
The old kernel (2.6.18-128 series and previous) would all attempt to load the driver. The latest update would load the ath5k module and work fine, but then would hang when breaking down the interface. Not only did it require a full reboot, but it was necessary to kill the machine to get the kernel to completely shut down. According to the CentOS Wiki page for Wireless, this was an acknowledged problem. I found the bugzilla discussion about this, but no solution was posted on that list. Finally, I ran across a reference to some testing kernels built specifically against CentOS 5. I chose the latest (kernel-2.6.18-162), but installed it alongside the official released, instead of as an upgrade. It worked without a hitch.
Apparently the next release (5.4) will include something later as upgrade, but it’s good to know this, at least, has already been fixed.
Card: Netgear WG511T with Atheros AR2414 chip (AKA AR5212).
Update: Now, a month later, CentOS/RedHat released a later kernel (2.6.18-164.el5) as part of the standard update, and it works just fine for this chipset.
Nice Post, btw do you know any good usenet archives and or mailing list archives site for unix / linux / bsd
Frankly, I prefer to use search engines. There are a couple of good forums for asking advice, in particular regarding various BSDs and Linux distros, but for chasing down the answer to some particular issue, I prefer to use search. Chances are, someone has covered that particular issue, often on a blog like this one.