Well they finally fixed the new MADWiFi driver to work with AMD64 again, after about two months or so of it causes a kernel oops whenever traffic was transmitted over the wireless link. I have been too busy to get a new card and so I am still using this one. Still not happy about the closed source HAL and think the reasoning behind it is flaky. It is little better than a proprietary driver, but the old driver worked and thanks to brix the new driver is in portage already and has been rekeyworded ~amd64.
Hopefully wireless in Linux will improve soon, I don't think closed source drivers are the answer though. In other news I have also brought the latest version of boinc out of package.mask to receive wider testing. It seems to be working pretty well, but still isn't as smooth as I would like. If anyone has ideas on how to improve it, or better yet patches, I would love to hear from you.
Sadly the latest madwifi causes KPs for me on x86.
I've "spammed" brix with the errors I got, but he must've been busy these last 2 days, because he hasn't responded much after telling me it should be a pretty straightforward upgrade from the 20050420 ebuild. In fact, that was true, the upgrade was very simple and straightforward. It just didn't work.
Three times I had to hard-reset my system before I gave up and downgraded to 20050420, which of course worked flawlessly.
So, for now I've added them to my package.mask file as:
>=net-wireless/madwifi-tools-0.1401.20060117
>=net-wireless/madwifi-driver-0.1401.20060117
Can't I define only exactly that ebuild version? Since I will not know if there is ever a newer vesion out with that mask.
I think I'll just set it to never allow a update again for the bloody thing.