A couple of months ago I installed Ubuntu Eee. At the time I remarked that I was having a problem with the wifi being intermittent, and with my trip to Leeds for Christmas being tomorrow, I’ve had a look at this now.
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.