Using a Eee 900A netbook by Asus. By pressing Fn + F2, I can disable or enable the wireless chip on the netbook, a blue LED indicates the status. I've been able to connect to wireless networks just fine with this netbook. However, if the wireless chip ever becomes disabled, I have to reboot to get my network connection back. This generally happens when suspending. For some reason the LED will be off and I have to hit Fn + F2 for it to light up again. However, after doing so, Linux will not reconnect to the network. It simply changes the wireless status from "wireless is disabled" to "device not ready". Even worse, I've recently had issues with the chip being enabled at boot, thus making it nearly impossible to get connected.
I've searched around on-line but haven't found much of anything useful on this. This happens on all kinds of different distros including Ubuntu 9.10 Netbook, EeeBuntu 4 beta, Jolicloud and Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook.
Edit
I noticed this question is getting a lot of views. To give a quick update, I never did resolve this issue with the given distro's. However, I'm currently running Ubuntu 10.10 netbook edition and this issue has gone away.
Best Answer
I can confirm that WICD (in Ubuntu community repos: add community/universe repos in sources then apt-get install wicd) does recover from sleep and hibernate with Wireless Networking working more often than not on my machine. --But, it is not 100%, thus my visit to this web page. Pertinent details: Kubuntu 12.04 64-bit, Intel Core2 Duo, Intel 3945ABG.
The first thing I do on a new *buntu/Debian install is get rid of the stock networking utility and install WICD...