I’m using the original WiFi card in my eee, which does not have native out-of-the-box support from OS X.
Luckily, some third-party “drivers” are available from RALink, makers of the card.
The word drivers was in quotes in that last sentence because although this software allows use of the WiFi card, it doesn’t really supply a Mac OS X driver in the strictest sense of the word. A real driver would just invisibly do its job, allowing you to connect to wireless networks with the normal user interface - you wouldn’t really know that it was there.
The RALink software, in contrast, is rather painful, and a real eyesore. It consists of a custom application which you have to launch when you log in, and which opens a single window which you can’t resize or close.
This window has a tabbed interface with a great deal of random clutter on it that almost nobody will ever care about. The layout is a real dog’s dinner, and looks like it was probably created by a programmer who isn’t used to design visual UI of any kind, let alone for a Mac.
In amongst this is a list of the visible networks in range, and a (confusing) interface allowing you to join one. By default the software does not remember the password for a network, forcing you to re-enter it each time. However, there is a mechanism on a different tab which allows you to save “profiles”, which do save your password to a particular network. You can have multiple profiles, but only one is active at a given time, and you have to choose manually.
All in all, this software is a bit of a mess, but I suppose we should be grateful that it exists and that it has been made freely available. Personally I’d like to see RALink release it as open source - at the very least that would allow someone who knows what they are doing to clean up the UI.
In the meantime, I may upgrade my wireless card, just to get rid of this software. Which is a bit of a shame, since the built in card seems to actually work perfectly well.