every single new release of Ubuntu seems to have way too many
issues. Disabling the very common Atheros chipset and not making that
known widely, is almost criminal. Thanks for pointing this out to us.

That explains why betas of 8.10 seemed fine, yet every single Live CD
8.10 Final variant I've been trying lately have been failing on
wireless test.

I still like Debian, but am going to stick with MEPIS or AntiX for a
good all around hardware compatible Debian-based OS. Hard to beat
these MEPIS variants based around 7 (Etch). The MEPIS 8 betas (based
upon Lenny) have given me bootup issues on one machine although
working well on others. Most report that the beta 8 of MEPIS runs
slower than MEPIS 7.

With AntiX, defaulting to Fluxbox window manager and giving iceWM as
an option, I've grown to like the extra speed on slower machines
through those less resource-demanding window managers as compared to
KDE, Gnome, or XFCE. Another item that AntiX contains is the WICD
wireless configuration (available in repositories for other OSes). I
prefer this over MEPIS's own network manager configuration program.