Wireless in Mepis 7.0

Today I finally got wireless working in Mepis 7.0 and it really wasn't that difficult.
According to Synaptic, Mepis already had madwifi 0.9.3.2 installed but this simply didn't work.
Then I downloaded and compiled 0.9.3.3 but that too didn't work.
Actually at this point i noticed that lspci didn't id the Atheros wireless card correctly and I posted to the mepis forums on this.
All I had to do to rectify this was to type "update pciids" (as root) and that got it right.
Unfortunateley, that didn't fix the problem.
So I downloaded and compiled the svn trunk madwifi and this worked perfectly, first time.
However, kNetworkmanager still wasn't picking up any devices at all so this meant that I had to go through quite a rigmarole in a terminal to get ath0 to connect afetr every boot.
To get the knm-applet to work better I had to take EVERYTHING out of /etc/network/interfaces and just replace this with

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

Now, knetworkmanager sees the devices but i still have to pick the one I want, enter the wallet password and then it connects.
This is exactly what happens in Sabayon which is also kde.
In the Gnome-based OSes, wireless connects directly at boot with no intervention from me.
Nevertheless, this is a major advance.
Actually, I'm very impressed with Mepis and the only problem I have is that I can't rotate the CF cube. Strangely, I can't get anybody to even reply to me on this problem which usually suggests it's not a widspread problem.