So, I just finished installing Debian Lenny on my eeePC701, following the instructions on the Debian eeePC wiki. First attempt failed in phase 'installing packages' due to an unrecoverable error trying to fetch/install some language (i18n) file (didn't note the exact name), appearantly as a result of my choice of language 'german'.
Ok, next try was to just repeat the whole procedure with language 'english', and voila, everything went smoothly, as described - seems the localized packages still need some love .
The basic install was as proposed without X/DE, so I directly adviced aptitude to install xorg+kde 3.5.9 afterwards, which also completed fine. Now, this little device finally can be configured as I like to.
Not that the original Xandros install is that bad (worked well overall, after some commonly known tweaks) - the point is just that the Xandros Software repository is way too sparse (no koffice e.g., not even gnupg/kgpg!) and building own packages against the rather outdated base (Xandros is still based on Debian Sarge) is just too cumbersome. Another point is that Asus decided not to use a full muli-user linux base system, but rather a single user appoach (the only user is predefined as 'user' ;-) ) for the sake of faster bootup. As a result, there is no way to setup an account for a 2nd person with personal settings/files, which is just bad.
So, having a complete, full-featured Lenny running now, is very good - the only thing which kept me apart from doing that, was:
1.) wail until Lenny is out and Debian eeePC project having adopted it.
2.) I was unsure if there would be a GUI-driven, easy to use wifi-configuration as is the Xandros one.
As for 2.), I was quite aware that the kde 3.5 standard wifi-manager (knetworkmanager) is not a real choice, as it doesn't even support WPA encryption, so I gave Wicd a try, as proposed in the Debian eeePC wireless wiki page. This turned out to be just what I had been looking for - easy to use, detects all wireless networks within reach with everything (type of encryption etc.) just ready to select - great.
So I'm overall very impressed from this experiment, I'll now work with this (Debian is installed on a cheap 4GB SD card) for awhile, leaving the stock Xandros install untouched in case something turns out to force me back.
But I'm quite sure I'll be able to ditch Xandros soon in favour of a Lenny install on the internal flash drive ...