The net-wireless/madwifi port version is too old and doesn't work with the IBM X31 laptop wireless card. Updating to the latest CVS version (and making sure that COPTS is set to -DSOFTLED before building) solve the problem.
I've just added a new snapshot to portage yesterday, can you please test for me? I've not added the -DSOFTLED yet, but I will soon.
Seems to work (without the LED of course).
madwifi-driver-0.1_pre20040906 and madwifi-tools-0.1_pre20040906 are both in the tree now. This should work for everybody. emerge rsync ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=~x86 emerge madwifi-driver madwifi-tools Please test and CLOSE appropriate bugs if this solves the problem anybody was having.
Technically there's new bugs tracking the new versions of madwifi so this could really be a dup of those even though came after. However closing this for a test request since it's been 4 months now.
Closing due to lack of feedback.