Browsing the Eeeuser forum I found an interesting thread about an un-announced (and unreleased) OS build, which looks like a 1.7 beta or something similar.

According to the source of information, the iso could be downloaded from here. Look for EeePC_1.7-2009-01-20_09-52.iso

I decided to try it on the EeePC 900, which I barely use anymore. Created an installable usb image from the iso with unetbootin, and installed the 1.7 beta.

Interestingly enough it seems to support a wast amount of different EeePC versions (from 700 upto S101, including my 900 as well).

First I tried the uncompressed installation but it did not boot, so I went for the compressed image (which is a but slower according to the install information)

And it works…

The default “skin” of the 1.7 build is nice:

And the very nice thing is that finally it has Firefox 3… (ok, still only 3.04)

So far it seems to be stable fro browsing via wifi connection. Worth to try.

Also, upgrading Firefox to the latest 3.5.2 was much easier than before. just downloaded Linux binary and extracted into the XandrOS firefox install directory under /opt (carefully without the plugin directory which was actually a link).

Final note on tweaking, the keyboard: since I use a localized hungarian keyboard, the xorg.conf file needs to be modified. simple.
Edit: the tweaking was unnecessary… The is a nice GUI to add/remove additional keyboard languages:

One small annoyance, as I wanted to set some settings for the touchpad, as soon as I hit the Touchpad icon under settings, the mouse cursor stopped responding. After some trial and error, I found out that one line needs to be changed in xorg.conf in order to function (in InputDevice section for synaptic)
     Option   “SHMConfig”  “false”
originally it was value “true”
The Touchpad utility does not work, but the mouse (including side scrolling) does.