it seems that whenever you have a technical quandry, someone on the Internet has already documented how to solve it, and more frequently, has created an entire company around solving that one issue as well. 

Witness.

I was trying to get Ubuntu 8 (Hardy Heron) onto an Asus EEE to no avail.  It seems that the good people from Ubuntu land have already made their own distributions just for netbooks.  Err -- started just for the Asus EEE

Behold, EasyPeasy.  I have no idea if it's any good, and I expect I will end up putting a full Ubuntu distro on one Asus or the other, but for this week I will experiment.

I'm only worried about the insistent on keeping junk like Skype etc.  Oh wells, we shall see

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_Eee