Since late 2007 I have a Asus Eee PC 701, and have since different operating systems tested on that computer. Of these, those in which I have had more interest were the different versions of Ubuntu.
As soon as Ubuntu 8.04 was available, I removed the Xandros that came originally with the computer and replaced it with that version of Ubuntu. Initially, I met with many difficulties, mainly due to unsupported hardware components or not recognized directly by the distribution in question.
Six months later, Ubuntu 8.10 was released, which contained a number of improvements over the previous version. Things began to improve, so that it was a little easier to get all the components of the system works correctly, but still needed to manually make some modifications on it. The difficulties were mainly for the WiFi card (Atheros AR2425), which was not recognized directly by the kernel. The next version (Ubuntu 9.04) was announced by a kernel that already recognized and directly supported wireless card this team so I've been testing with the USB-live versions have been published, from Alfa
4 . Indeed, one of the great advantages of this version is its full support and without changing anything
of all hardware components of the Asus Eee PC 701 (WiFi card included). 
When, in late April, he published the final version of Ubuntu 9.04, I made a clean installation (instead of upgrading from the previous version) of that version. The version I had previously installed (8.10) had been modified in many ways with respect to a standard installation, and my goal was to find out what point the new version was able to function and to recognize the components of the equipment in question.
The result could not have been more successful: The hardware components are recognized and work properly without any modifications. The wireless card (which had been the most problematic) and was immediately detected available wireless networks nearby. I had no difficulty in connecting to the home access point that uses WEP encryption: It was just enter the password, and start browsing.
The next big improvement noted with previous versions is related to speed. It is not a subjective comparison, but comparing the outputs of dmesg (/ var / log / messages) for the previous version (8.10) and current (9.04). The times have been shortened significantly. The SSD is recognized and managed more adequately than before, thereby obtaining a system which, despite its limited resources (a Celeron 630MHz and 512MB of memory) responds surprisingly agile. Importantly, the system has been optimized for a fast start, but deals only with the default installation. The only change has been made is the choice of ext2 filesystem instead of ext3, and the absence of partition exchange (swap).
17:00
We press the power button 17:08
initial screen Asus Eee PC Screen
17:10 GRUB boot loader GRUB launches
17:13 boot option 17:42
10s: BIOS
9s: User interaction: GRUB + GDM login / greeter
48s: Start System: Loading + logon + WiFi connection
As a comment for information: For the timer in the video, the Eee PC has been placed in front of the screen of a desktop computer (a Pentium 4 that already have some years old) and has executed the following statement:
$ xclock-digital-strftime "% M:% S"-face-140-courier update 1
- the desktop, of course, also uses Ubuntu 9.04; -)
- The purpose of this article is to analyze Ubuntu 9.04, but only to assess their usability in this particular unit. As mentioned above, the team has only 512MB of memory, which are more than sufficient to perform routine tasks with the system in question. In fact, initially the system uses just under 130MB of memory, leaving more than 350MB available for use by applications.
see some improvements and changes from previous versions, including the management mechanism of network connections and the new visual appearance of the notifications.
components such as audio controller and the built, operate properly without requiring any modification.
Even with a team so limited, you can see youtube videos in HD (video
example). 
related utilities gestón (ACPI), such as suspend, wake up and turn off the computer working properly. Most of the keys hotkeys also do, with the exception of the button to activate and deactivate the wireless card. This is the only detail I've found so far that needs to be configured manually.
Thus, the final comment could be as follows: For those seeking a notebook (netbook) capable of running a standard distribution without restrictions (except those relating to performance due to the modest hardware) as if we were working on a desktop computer, I recommend without any doubt the use of Ubuntu 9.04 on this kind equipment.
