Never mind.. doing that made the wireless adapter show up, and lease an IP, but nothing else would work. Lame.
I ended up copying the driver from Windows and using ndiswrapper.. it appears to be ok now.
Now to get the rest of the hardware working properly with Ubuntu.. actually.. I don’t think I really care about the webcam/SD reader/function keys..
on a default ubuntu-8.10-desktop-i386 install BEFORE updating kernel/packages:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-intrepid
reboot. ta-da, wireless!
my mistake was updating the kernel beforehand. that package didn’t add wireless support. attempting to build the driver source and loading it into the kernel seemed to only be for the EEE 1000H, not 1000HA. stupid me wasted 2-3 hours dying for nothing.
Rikipedia 