I picked up an Intel 4965AGN Mini PCI Express card on eBay, the other day, hoping it would work in my Eee.  Strangely enough, it works well, and Debian had no problem detecting it (ok, it's been in vanilla kernels for awhile, I guess).

I couldn't find much documentation on which antenna did what, so I just hooked up the Eee's two connectors to 1 and 2.  Seems that it has some auto diversity setting in software - signal strength on 802.11g is great (I don't have any other 802.11n gear…):

Retry min limit:7   RTS thr:off   Fragment thr=2352 B
Link Quality=97/100  Signal level=-56 dBm  Noise level=-95 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Kismet works great, too.  I changed the source type to be iwl4965, and away it went.  Again, I don't have (or know of any near my condo) any 802.11n gear, so I couldn't test if it actually would see the beacons.  I suppose I could do some warwalking…

The only problems so far seem to be ad-hoc mode and some small lockups during interface down events.  ad-hoc mode just doesn't work - and I'm not sure why.  Whenever the interface is shut down (ifconfig wlan0 down), the whole system will hard lock for a few seconds, then return to normal.  Doesn't bother me that much, so I'll ignore it.

Also, I think the card supports attaching a couple LEDs that possibly show some association status and activity information:

[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:radio
[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:assoc
[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:RX
[31546.643843] Registered led device: iwl-phy1:TX

Too bad the Eee offers no physical LEDs for such purposes.  Oh well.

Also, in other news, I returned the other Eee that was discussed in this post.

Update: To get ad-hoc working on this card - I had to grab the compat-wireless sources from 2008/09/09 (available here, if they've taken them off kernel.org) and load the iwlagn.ko module.  Unfortunately none of the Debian kernels have the newest version, and the new compat-wireless sources break iwlagn.  Supposedly the ad-hoc fix was merged into 2.6.28-rc1, so we'll have to wait awhile for this to get into Debian and other distros, I guess.

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