Without reading the manual, I decided to set up the wireless router today. I plugged it in, turned on the Mac and configured away. It worked. I was happy. I turned on the Asus Eee. The connection worked, too.
I figured that was that.
Later in the afternoon, I brought the Asus Eee into the bedroom, so I could surf a bit before joining Lucien for siesta. I tried connecting, and got a surly “no DHCP offers received” message from the Eee. I tried thrice. No luck. The connection was always “pending,” like those really useful bills in Congress.
I googled my problem and ran into others with similar issues at the eeeuser forum. I reset the router around five times, fiddled with leaving it open, using WEP or WPA, created a connection entry under the Networks app and finally got it to work. I don’t know which thing I did worked, exactly. It could have been a matter of throwing out an entire bunch of banana peels, crossing my fingers, and slipping on the right one.
Happiness and sanity restored.