2. Does anyone have experience of debian edu on an eeepc? (or cloudbook,
etc.) As a workstation I suppose, but maybe standalone. Does anyone
advise me for or against buying a set of eeepc for my school?
There is a project on Debian for eeepc:
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEeePC
There you should find all the needed docs to make it run smoothly in
Debian.
I've had an eeepc in my hands and player a little bit with it. I think
it's fine for geeks or for little children, but, in my opinion, the
small keyboard makes it a bad option for children > 10 years. The small
screen might be also a problem, but I'm not so sure of it, as children
have usually better view than adults, and the laptop is going to be very
near to the eyes.
Anyway, there are more options around [1] that might be, at least, as
attractive as the eeepc. I had now on my desktop a hp mininote 2133 [2].
It's also a small laptop (1.090 gr weighted in my kitchen scales ;-),
but with a full sized keyboard and a bigger screen.
The worst part for all these laptops is obviously that their perfomance
is pretty bad, even with 1 gb of RAM (as the mininote has), it's really
slow, not only with OpenOffice, but also when watching youtube videos or
playing flash games. I know that's not the goal of these laptops, but it
will customize the opinion the students (and their parents) have about
where we spend their money.