..well, as a Debian user myself (my main OS being Solaris), I'd suggest you don't waste time trying to load Ubuntu and Debian on the same box. They're practically the same, with Ubuntu the more newbie-friendly. If you want to learn, I'd suggest you stick with one, learn it fairly well, then jump to other distributions like SuSE or RH , because then you have a better grasp of a Linux-based OS and it will be easier for you to see the differences among the distributions.

As for the atheros-based wireless card, atheros is probably the more common chipset, and should be pretty easy to make it work using ndiswrapper, using Windows drivers.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...er/Ndiswrapper