My tech skills are mighty. Sorta.

OK, my google-fu is strong.

I just got an Asus EeePC 900 4G (it's purple with little swirls on it. Hush.) Problematically, the wireless card didn't work, and since the thing's a netbook, the point is kind of that you take it places and use wireless internet. Which defeats the purpose somewhat.

So I poked around on the web, found some forum stuff, and nothing really worked. I got a friend to come over and bring a bootable disk to install Ubuntu, and that didn't fix it. It gave me a nicer user interface, though, which is great, because the default Asus one made me want to stab somebody (namely the person who wrote it. God, it's completely non-intuitive, despite most likely being designed to be incredibly intuitive, for kids or anyone who's not familiar with computers. Which doesn't apply to me.)

Anyway. I got my google on. I downgraded the kernel to intrepid (after having updated it to jaunty). In order to make that work, I had to edit the grub boot list. (That would be google "kernel downgrade".)

I followed these instructions for installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix and its hacks, though I didn't get down to the stuff for Fn keys and fan control; I don't think that's a problem. I might go back and do it later, though it's probably not necessary, considering the other things I did later. The eee repository at array.org was also useful, though their instructions made me O_o. (The previous link is good.)

Having done all that, the wifi still didn't work. On a whim, I changed my network settings on my wireless router, and ... it worked. OK. Whatever.

The Fn key toggles for the wireless card didn't work, so I followed these solutions for problems with jaunty on eeepcs. Because, for some reason, I have terrible luck getting things like updates to work, I then went to the EeePC wiki at statux.org. I followed the directions for fixing the hotkeys and wireless toggle, though it didn't quite work. I can toggle the wireless card off, but not back on, despite putting the text in the grub file as directed. I can work around that, anyway, because I can just not turn off the wireless card if I'm going to want to use it before rebooting. An inelegant solution, true, but it works. I'll have to keep an eye out for any updates to that.

But anyway, now that my Eee PC 900 works, I'm a lot happier with it. I assume if you get one of the Windows ones, it won't be this much of a pain in the neck. But I don't do Windows.