I have several EEE PCs 901s for the most part. Also a 1005, I believe.
The 901 has WiFi and Bluetooth as well as the SD slot as many of you likely know. I know Ubunto was quite popular for it, but was told that the latest versions were likely not the best for the EEE 901. So, I am looking for the best all around ver that will allow me to utilize it to use email, the later ver of Chrome, and so forth with a good GUI. Hopefully something similar to XP as this is what my wife was so used to using. I also have a 901 that I plan to pull the extra 12gig drive, and put in a 64 gig drive. These little netbooks were pretty bad using windows, but did quite well with Linux. Their big failing was not a lot memory and the most you could get it up to was 2 gigs. Still, I'm not looking to do CAD or Photoshop on it! Just want to do email, web, as in pay bills, check the crazy face book junk, look at some photos and some movies from the camera and the like. all easy stuff for Linux. My old 701 EEE could do all that with the Debian Linux it came with. It's not supported much anymore though. The computer still works though!

http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?tit...tallation_Tips

Install methods has not changed much. I run Antix 16 on my Intel Atom Touch Screen Netbooks.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/mx-...Final/MX-16.1/

Use the i386 iso on your eeepc. Full iso is best. I'd remove your email address in your post to keep spammers from flooding your email account. I sold my 701SD and 900 dual ssd drive eeepc's a while back.

I replaced them with single core n270 atom touchscreen toughbooks that are water resistant. They travel well in my motorcycle saddlebags.

Android i386 may be another good option for you. I've installed it on others atom netbooks. It works OK I guess. I just prefer AntiX is all.

http://www.android-x86.org/

Usually. The best Linux is the one you are comfy cozy using and supports your hardware . Modern Kernels support old eeepcs in Linux pretty much now.

Salix open box or Salix fluxbox is another option based on slackware.

https://www.salixos.org/

I've ran those also on atom netbooks.

Slackel is another like Salix that works OK.

http://www.slackel.gr/forum/about.htm

Everything I've recommended can be installed on a usb and ran live 1st before installing.
Good luck with it.

Edit. I prefer to keep this on a forum setting in a thread. Personal emails are not my thing with strangers and folks using google online for solutions like you are looking for will not get the benefit of my advice.

If you decide you like AntiX best. Here is a video channel full of how tos.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFW...KlXW5uE9opXukQ

1 members found this post helpful.

AntiX would do fine. In fact, the 4GB drive would be actually be big enough to install it on, as the minimum requirement is only 2.7!
http://antix.mepis.org/index.php?title=Main_Page

I would personally go with Debian 9 with XFCE4 desktop environment. Unfortunately, the eeePC 901 has an Atom 1.6Ghz CPU, which is very sluggish. Worse, it's 32 bit, which means you can't run the latest version of Chrome. Google stopped supporting Chrome on 32 bit.

You can still run the latest version of Chromium on it, though, but it doesn't have the DRM copy protection required to play Netflix. You can use Firefox for Netflix, but in any case you'll have to upgrade to 2GB of RAM if you want to watch Netflix on this computer. With 1GB it'll choke and stop playing video after a couple seconds.

(I have a couple netbooks with similar specs - an eeePC and an Acer Aspire One...I know how well these things run using the Debian 9 with XFCE4 with first hand experience.)

if you MUST have "the latest chrome" then i guess you should go with android_x86.
but even then the experience will not be satisfactory (at least it wouldn't be for me).
keep in mind that smartphones have long since overtaken the specs of that lovely little netbook, in EVERY respect.

if you choose a real gnu/linux, i guess antix is a good one.

you can try browsers like qupzilla, or palemoon, because they are equipped to handle the internet of 2017, yet as lightweight and userfriendly as possible.
apart from that, you can try browsers like dwb, dillo, netsurf, qutebrowser... (lighter, but less features, harder to use)
same goes for basically every application you install.
i speak from experience, i have a similar netbook and the standard firefox/thunderbird combo is getting extremely sluggish.

1 members found this post helpful.

Looks like I have my work cut out for me. I downloaded the AntiX Linux (ISO) and it looks like it will fit the bill according to the video. I do have a 2 gig memory upgrade that I can install. It will be a little while till I can do it, as I have some medical stuff that I have to get done first, but I really want to have these ISO's on a drive so I have them to work with while I am down for the count. I have 3 901's, a 1005, and a 701 that all need an OS installed. One of the 901's has XP on it but is so slow that it is simply not usable. I think Putting it on an SD card to do the install is a great idea too! Thanks again to you all and I will let you know when I actually get it done!

What version of Debian is on them? IIRC it's a pretty old version, but depending on which version you might be able to simply do a dist-upgrade to Debian 9.

I'm a bit wary of trying to use the SD card to do any part of the install. My experience with SD card is that booting off of it is often problematic and sometimes just impossible, and some SD cards just do not play reliably well with ext file systems.

Stick with USB thumbdrive or USB optical drive to do the installs. If you know what you're doing, then you can save a lot of time by doing a normal Debian 9 install to a USB thumbdrive and simply clone to the eeePCs with dd. You can do the initial install and configuration etc on any computer - do it on a fast computer to save time.

Also to save time, make the OS partition maybe 4GB in size because this will make dd cloning take less time. Then, you can use gparted to expand the OS partition to the full size.

This way, you only need to do your initial install and desired UI customization once. Then, you can clone it onto each eeePC.

I've never heard of a built-in SD card reader that was bootable.

On the 901 this works well.

I was using crunchbang on mine which was wonderful. I have hardly used this machine for a few years but I'm planning to use it on a journey that I want to travel light & have only just discovered that cruchbang died :-( RIP So I can't just update the system.

Pure debian is a nightmare to install because of the hardware & the SS disk space being split into two. Q4OS has just caught my eye. Does anything think it is likely to install easily on a 901?

I do love q4os, but the installer is just a modified version of the Debian installer, so if Debian has issues, q4os probably will too.

If your drive is less than 4GB the GUI installer probably won't work, but the command line installer will. AntiX is a very good choice, methinks.