I was going to install KDE in my Eee, but it ended up being more of a hassle to configure the wlan than put up with it’s normal interface.
Once you Ctrl+Alt+T into the terminal you can get more power.
GPS
I bought a usb gps, the Navilock GPS USB (NL-454US) which works fine with gpsd on linux, as it uses the NMEA-0183 standard. I had to install gpsd by adding repositories mentioned in this EeeUser wiki article and simply sudo apt-get install gpsd-ing. I believe it is the xandros repository which has gpsd inside. I could then use it with JOSM to capture stuff for OpenStreetMap.
N95 Modem
In order to connect to the web via my Nokia phone, I found these instructions. I do, however, have to sudo wvdial and sudo firefox to browse using this connection (I’ve not yet worked out how to un-root it).