Hi Gary,

I found your page very helpful, but as you've noted, due to recent
changes in the debian wpa_supplicant install, your instructions are a
little out of date. Here's what I had to do to make it work for me.

Debian sid
kernel 2.6.16
wpa_supplicant 0.4.8
ifplugd 0.28
madwifi-ng

1. In /etc/default/wpa_supplicant, I changed the driver option to
  'wext' to use the kernel wireless extentions:

#/etc/default/wpa_supplicant
ENABLED=1
OPTIONS="-D wext -i ath0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf"

2. In /etc/network/interfaces, I added two stanzas to the ath0
  section, one indicating the wext driver, and the second pointing to
  the wpa_supplicant conf file. (I think wext is the default, so that
  one might be redundant.)

...
# Wireless... (this section may or may not already exist)
allow-hotplug ath0
iface ath0 inet dhcp
        wpa-driver wext
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

This works so far, at least using WEP. I've not yet had the
opportunity to try it on an open access point or with WPA. The only
problem I still want to address is that wpa_supplicant doesn't get
killed upon removing the wireless card, but that's not a big deal.

Thanks again for your very helpful web page.

Best,

David Wainberg