Asus Eee PC 1008HA BIOS update

One of the coolest things about the latest versio of Ubuntu is that Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope includes out of the box support for a number of Intel Atom based netbooks. Power management, WiFi, and even some computer hotkey combinations work as soon as you install Jaunty Jackalope on older Asus Eee PC models, for example. But it turns out that if you install Ubuntu 9.04 on a brand new Eee PC 1008HA there’s one thing that doesn’t work right away: the WiFi card.

At least one user has reported that you need to install the compat-wireless package for Ubuntu in order to get the wireless card up and running. 

It’s worth noting that Asus did just release a BIOS update for the Eee PC 1008HA, which is supposed to address wireless issues. But it’s not clear if this will have any impact on Ubuntu performance. 

I also haven’t heard anything yet about users installing custom Linux distributions like Eeebuntu or Easy Peasy on the Eee PC 1008HA yet. It’s still a pretty new computer and it isn’t available in all parts of the world yet. But since the netbook does feature a dramatically different look than most Asus netbooks, we probably shouldn’t be surprised if it uses a few different internal components like wireless adapters from earlier models as well.

via I4U