I decided the time had come to move to something a bit newer, however, and have just finished installing Ubuntu 8.04.  Using the ISO from the Ubuntu Eee website, it was a fairly painless install.  I was disappointed to see that the installer didn’t set up fstab in the manner I prefer – with a limited number of writes on the internal SSD available, I like to put /tmp, /var, and others on a tmpfs mount – but that was easily sorted.

What wasn’t quite so easy was the wireless.  Unfortunately, Asus have opted to use one of Atheros’s less supported wireless chipsets in the Eee – with no official Linux driver available.  The madwifi-ng driver included as part of the Ubuntu-Eee package sort of worked, but tended to drop out rather frequently – oddly, when the signal was at its strongest rather than its weakest.

Rather than put up with a spotty signal, I grabbed the madwifi-ng build I had from the original Ubuntu 7.04 install and compiled it on 8.04.  A quick reboot later and the wireless is back to its old reliable self again.  This way, I get the best of both words – the reliable wireless from Ubuntu 7.04, and the shiny new Compiz Fusion desktop effects from Ubuntu 8.04.

The driver I used for this is available here, so if you want to do the same as I did simply download the file and extract it as so:

tar xfvz eeewifi.tar.gz

Then start the compilation and installation process thusly:

cd madwifi-ng-r2756-20071018
make clean
sudo make install

Reboot, and your wireless should be working a treat!