So for whatever reason I found myself looking for a Linux distribution for the Asus Eee PC 4G (701) today, in 2019 :D
Right now I am running BunsenLabs Linux Helium on it, from image bl-Helium-4-i386.iso
. For installation troubleshooting, see my other answer. This distro is based on Debian 9, so pretty close to a recent Ubuntu. It runs nicely, with most of the Fn keyboard shortcuts etc. working out of the box, and still is very compact (~120 MiB main memory usage after start). Also, since it's Debian based, the .deb
packaging system and package names etc. are all the same as in Ubuntu, and you can even add packages from Ubuntu repositories.
About the CPU incompatibility issue
My first guess was that you might need a non-PAE kernel for this computer. PAE is "physical address extension", allowing a 32-bit processor to access main memory beyond 4 GiB. Normal Ubuntu / Lubuntu boot options in current releases fail to start the Linux kernel on non-PAE CPUs. The Eee PC 4G (701) uses a CPU "Intel Celeron M Processor ULV 353", which supports 32-bit Physical Address Extension (PAE), according to the specs. So it turns out that it is not necessary to utilize a non-PAE distribution. I installed a regular (PAE based) kernel, and it runs just fine.
So I am not sure what causes the "CPU incompatibility" issue in your case. Side note: Though I did not need it for this model of computer, some CPUs falsely advertise that they don't support PAE when in fact they do. In these cases, you can force the execution of a PAE kernel with with kernel options forcepae -- forcepae
(detailed instructions).