I'm using EasyPeasy on a EEE 701 (the very first official netbook) on a daily basis at work. When I upgraded UbuntuEEE 8.04 to Easy Peasy 1.1 (based on Ubuntu 8.10), I started to experience a very slow and intermittent wifi. I tried a lot of tweaks, in vain.
I finally found out that replacing the installed wifi driver (ath5k) with the 'official' XP wifi driver (wrapped in ndiswrapper) it works much better. To do so:
- Connect to the internet through an ethernet connection as the next step disables wifi.
- Remove existing driver
sudo modprobe -r ath5k
- Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and add the following line at the bottom to make sure it won't be initialized anymore during boot
blacklist ath5k
- Install ndiswrapper
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-common ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
- Download the windows XP wifi driver for EeePC 4G (701)
- Navigate to the folder containing the net5211.inf and run:
sudo ndiswrapper -i net5211.inf
- You should then be able to load the ndiswrapper module:
sudo ndiswrapper -m
- Finally, set the ndiswrapper module to load at each boot:
sudo ndiswrapper -ma && sudo ndiswrapper -mi
- Reboot (reboot can be avoided but I can't recall the command to load a driver dynamically)
Now that I think of it, I almost remember UbuntuEEE was also using the ndiswrapper method. Anyway, wifi works like a charm now!