If you want to try runnong Plan 9 on an EeePC, 9atom is tuned for that. I have one of the older ones (701 is the model, I think) and it does boot Plan 9.
I've also been an Atlast user for a few years. Can't believe I never heard about your fork of it. John Walker's writeup on Atlast should be required reading for all programmers.
I'm going to try 9atom. I have a newer Eee with no CD drive. With BSD I can convert iso to img, add boot code and be up and running quick. But I guess it won't be so simple with 9atom? If this works, I'll be very happy.
I couldn't agree more about the Atlast writeup. I'm glad for the vast proliferation of Lua, if for no other reason than it has made scriptability a library. I can certainly believe you've never heard of my fork. I actually feel bad because it's still "in beta", being a work in progress. I've been meaning to send a patch to Mr. Walker for the 64-bit issues, but there's always another bug or feature in the way, and I've held off on a "real" (tarballs on a server, documentation) release until I ping him and fix some bugs.
Regarding 9atom, I don't recall any difficulties booting from USB, but it was a while back, and I didn't quite get it installed. I've been running 9front for the most part when I run Plan 9.
Thanks again for redirecting our attention toward some quality stuff.
I'm psyched to get some version of Plan9 running on a netbook. Plan9 is work of art.