Starting network interface at boot

["Steve Dondley" <s@dondley.com>]

Hi,

I'd like to have Debian fire up my wireless PCI card driver and network
interface at boot time.  But after hours of searching, I haven't found
anything that spells it out for a newbie like me.

I need to put the following lines in some rc file to get my network up:

/etc/init.d/wlan0 start
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.3
route add default gw 192.168.1.1

I thought the etc/network/interfaces file was supposed to take care of this
for me (by me placing the keyword "auto" in front of the interface's name)
but it doesn't.

So what is the best way of accomplishing this?

Thanks.