Turns out that the newer version of the madwifi drivers that Ubuntu Eee ships with don’t get on too well with the wifi chipset in the Eee 701, but an older version doesn’t have that issue. So I’ve just downloaded, compiled and installed these and it’s all good.

Fortunately this is now documented on the Ubuntu Eee wiki (which it wasn’t when I first started looking into this problem) and hopefully will be fixed fully in a future Ubuntu Eee release.

Install was easy, running off my USB stick that I had set up following instructions on the Ubuntu Eee website – with the traditional live-USB style beforehand so I could test that things work.

So far things are good, and in installing it over the recovery partition too I’ve managed to gain some more space for things I want to install, which is certainly nice. The one issue I have encountered is that the wifi seems to be stuck in some sort of powersaving mode as it works in bursts, which is a touch annoying, but I haven’t looked at this properly yet.

The interface is intuitive and good, very similar to the default Xandros one in terms of the large icons on the home app that sits above the desktop and all in all I like the way it works.