[Tuxaloosa] acer aspire one

[E Hanson]

so my wife bought me an acer aspire one for christmas (AND gave it to me 
early) and i have to say that i'm impressed. it came with xp home 
installed (which, i must say, ran pretty darn well), and it has a 160G 
hard drive (so no SSD). i toyed with the xp for a while, then got bored 
and wanted linux. so i instelled the ubuntu UNR release. it wasn't as 
fast to boot as the xp was, but almost everything worked out of the box 
(wireless, camera, touchpad, audio - no card readers yet though), and 
everything worked like you would expect an ubuntu distro to work. even 
had a custom gnome interface (https://wiki.edubuntu.org/UNR).
i didn't have to do any work to get it that way though.
so i am currently installing backtrack3 on it. why not right?
i have a problem though. i've got bt3 up and running from a usb stick 
and when i boot it up with the ethernet cable plugged in, all of the 
network interfaces work; but when i boot without it plugged in the all i 
get are eth0 and lo. no wireless.
has anyone ever seen this before? the wifi is an atheros AR5006EG.

erik