It's almost identical to bitcoin and you can use the same miners.  The only major difference right now is that the clients are daemon only.  There is not GUI interface that I have seen yet.  I am using namecoind.exe for windows which can be downloaded from the http://dot-bit.org landing page.  there are also some pages on that site discussing usage.

I noticed that bitparking.com (the only working namecoin pool) is down.  This may account for the foretasted difficulty decrease.