How do i Switch on the Wi-Fi? Physical Switch.

ok, i am a total NEWBIE and i have been googling my head off for the past week, trying to figure out how to do this with no avail.

the laptop has 2 physical switches in the front of it, one for bluetooth(i never used so i have no care for it), and the second is for the Wi-Fi, when it was running Win XP Pro you have to manually switch it on after booting up the computer to use the wireless internet, now how do i do this in linux? i understand its some sort of software or driver i need, but exactly what and how do i do it?

Acer Travelmate 2480-2705,
Atheros AR5BMB5 internal wireless/WI-FI
OpenSUSE 11.1

Getting Your Wireless to Work - openSUSE Forums

I’m guessing, but you will likely need to work on
Atheros madwifi - openSUSE