So I've installed eeeXubuntu on my eee 701. EeeXubuntu, as far as I can tell, is Xubuntu with a few eee pc tweaks---
Tuxradar recently named it the
best distribution to run on an eee 701.
Good luck getting a hold of it though---it seems to have been abandoned in favor of
eeebuntu. But as much as eeebuntu appealed to me, recent versions ship with the awful ath5k wireless driver--which, I'm sure, will be great one day, but currently, is shit: latency measured in whole seconds and 75% packet loss make it unusable for all practical purposes. Fortunately, I was able to find a more recent build, based on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex,
here.
True to form, this is essentially Ubuntu with a few extra shell scripts to configure all the ASUS-specific gubbins. There's a catch, though: the build I've linked to labels the shell scripts in Japanese, so it was a bit of a leap in the dark to get that configured right. Fortunately the rest of the OS was properly localized in English.
Once up and running, I was relieved to see that it uses the older madwifi driver, and Wi-Fi was running trouble-free. That's more like it.
If this is all fine and dandy, I think I'm going to run this until Ubuntu Intrepid gets EOL'd in April 2010--that'll be enough time for the ath5k driver to improve to where I can take a second look at it. And if that's true, then the next install will be probably use
Fluxbox and be based off a usable eeebuntu core.