I have had Arch Linux on my original Eeepc (preordered, I've had it since the beginning) for several years now, it has been great. That said, if you find they use best a traditional interface, you should consider Arch. See which one they like, and which one is easiest for them to use. You should show them a few options, and watch them use it for a bit. I recall trying a couple distros that had a similar setup to the original OS, with big buttons on, basically, a home screen. It's down for maintenance at the moment, but I'm sure they still have a number of threads on suggestions, in the archives if nothing else. In the early days, I was all over the forum, and there was quite a bit of discussion there about distros for the eeepc. But you might want to find one of the eeepc-optimized distros with their heavily customized UIs.

The bigger question you'll need to think about is what window manager to use.

In all 3, the super/house key is enabled. You may have to get another 701 for yourself - I have 2.Īnother useful feature of Crunchbang is the post-installation 'cb-welcome' script, which gives you options for which web-browser to install, libreoffice, java support, etc.ĪLL the above 3 have instant mobile broadband (dongle) support, all you have to do is configure it. It also idles at about 60MiB RAM, & rarely goes above 200MiB!!! This is what I currently have installed, & I have learned more from using this distro than any other. You WILL write your own shortcuts, & you WILL rewrite your OBMenu & Conky scripts, & learn some XML by accident! This is the best I've tried so far, on any hardware, with an excellent default Openbox set-up, that can use keyboard shortcuts for everything, which is great for a netbook.

This is a from-the-ground-up custom distro based on Ubuntu with Openbox WM, & great if you want a minimal desktop system with few apps installed, to build upon. Ubuntu 12.04, if you increase RAM to 2GiB & you want an all-singing, all-dancing installation, with a totally integrated DE, & don't keep much data on your machine. I know this is a late reply, but here goes:

Install windows 8 on asus eee pc 701