As I mentioned last night, I was surfing with my EeePC, by downgrading my wireless encryption to WEP.

I had also noticed that my EeePC didn’t like using my router as its DNS server, so I was able to fix that by swapping in the DNS servers for my ISP.   Once I’d done that, I installed updates using the EeePC’s add/remove software tool from the Easy Desktop.   However I noticed that the wireless updates were listed as a broken package.

At this point, the fact I’m an experienced Linux user kicked in, and I decided to just boot up Synaptic instead.  Its pre-installed on the EeePC, so sudo synaptic from the terminal launches it no bother.  I then used it to install all the available upgrades, which included a newer version of wpa_supplicant.

The great news is that this has made all the difference.   WPA now connects to my home network no bother, so I no longer have to worry about lowering my level of security to use my EeePC.  If anyone else buys one, I heartily recommend just using Synaptic to upgrade the software from the default repositories, it seems a bit more reliable than the Asus updater.