Wireless doesn't work in awesome wm

[Holyaxe]

I decided to install awesome on my laptop (Acer Aspire 5520), which is running Xubuntu 9.04. Wireless works without any problems in xfce, but when I use awesome, it doesn't. It seems to detect the network, but I don't know how to connect to it. This is what iwconfig says, if it helps:

lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 no wireless extensions.

wmaster0 no wireless extensions.

wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSID:"WLAN-AP"
Mode:Managed Frequency:2.437 GHz Access Point: Not-Associated
Tx-Power=20 dBm
Retry min limit:7 RTS thr: off Fragment thr=2352 B
Power Management: off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

pan0 no wireless extensions.

I am using ath5k driver, which works fine in xfce.

[Holyaxe]

I tried

iwconfig wlan0 channel X ap XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

(with the right channel and ap address of course) but it just doesn't work. No matter what I do, it says that access point is non-associated.

Could anyone help, please?

EDIT: I managed to configure the network using wicd. No more help needed.

[koushik.ms]

Always wanted to switch to awesome but couldn't get wireless up. Tried wicd but no luck. Even uninstalled nm (apt-get remove network-manager network-manager-gnome) and rebooted the machine since post-install wicd-daemon complained wicd monitor couldn't load. Finally verified wicd daemon, monitor all are OK and started wicd-gtk but couldn't connect to wireless network. In my situation (strangely) the essid of the network I want to connect to appears at least twice (sometimes 5-6 times) in the network list, some instance claiming it is WEP and others that it is WPA. I know it is WPA and so I gave the WPA passphrase and tried to connect any of the instance - but all failed.

Finally my solution was to remove wicd and reinstall network-manager* and to invoke nm-applet from within awesome with the following command.

nm-applet --sm-disable