After weeks of pulling my hair out, I finally got my wifi card working with the madwifi drivers. The last thing I need to do here is get it to initialize at boot up. I modified my /etc/network/interfaces file as follows:

neuromancer:~# cat /etc/network/interfaces
# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface (now disabled)
# auto eth0
# iface eth0 inet dhcp
# name Ethernet LAN card

# The wireless network interface Netgear WG-311T
auto ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp
name Wireless LAN card
wireless_essid xxxxxxxx (I x'd out the essid)

When I boot up, it still does not initialize, and I have to configure it with the CLI. Can someone with a working wifi card post their interfaces file? If not, could someone tell me how to include the rest of the information in this file, such as WEP key, channel number etc? Any help is very much appreciated.

Never mind, I figured it out. The entry wireless_essid xxxxx should have been wireless-essid xxxxx. Also, I added wireless-key xxxxx and wireless channel xx, where the x's are the correct info. Happy wifi user!!!

shouldn't the network device name be something like eth1 rather than ath0

It depends on the drivers you use. Some use eth1, ndiswrapper uses wlan0 and madwifi drivers use ath0. At least that is my experiance. My guess is that madwifi uses ath0 because madwifi drivers are for cards using the atheros chipsets.