oh i overreacted. but i'm very sensitive to frustrated users, because i have been so many times. as i mentioned to roberts, i often feel like doing certain things relating to internet access are like lucy holding out a football that says (in this instance, "wireless") and telling me to kick it (lucy always pulls the ball away at the last minute, and charlie brown lands on his back.)
that's got nothing to do with you. you're right, urls can be taken the wrong way "hey, read this, dumbass..." but i didn't really think that's what you meant. it's more along the lines of, when you've already tried so many things, having someone tell you to download something so you can get the internet working (that is precisely what i did,) sort of produces a "oh no, not again!" feeling, if not resentment.
you'd see i was no stranger to second tries if you saw my setup, but that was self inflicted... xubuntu uses xfce and lots of things are tied into the sessions, which aren't done the same way as in lighter or more traditional distros. (for example, there is no wpa*.conf anywhere, wpa_supplicant uses a file called wpa_supplicant-global3 but the file does not exist.) despite this, i got wireless working in jwm without .xsession by examining the output of ps -FA and replicating this and that, so i have a script that lets me get online even though i'm not using xfce anymore.
none of that helps here, sadly (and i'm not trying to use it.) before i had a wireless card that worked in linux, i bought a cardbus adapter just for eth, (because the laptop was a pii and didn't have its own,) and i could never get that working in the distro i was using, until i tried it in dsl and it "just worked." so i was very happy the first time i got online in linux, even though it took about a year just to do wired eth
with the help here last year, i got wired eth working in the earlier versions (where you had to modprobe) within days, now you don't have to do anything to use wired eth. i know that as more people ask about setting up wireless i'll find more things that i should try, and sooner or later i'll figure it out, because i know that it works in linux. perhaps i'll try wlan0 instead of ath0 next. (it's ath0 in conk, lsmod lists ath_pci and wlan, but ath_pci is used by "0" things, wlan is used by "5.") not sure wpa is the issue, in the setup it says "wep" but i do need the key. time to read more (again.)