I just installed Linux Mint Debian Edition and put Enlightenment as window manager. Now I'm running Eclipse and doing Android programming no bother on it though I'm using my phone rather than the emulator which was taking too long to start up.
But you'd be surprised what you can do with a 200 Euro laptop when you ditch the bloat of most modern desktop environment. I still have all the auto-mounting, wireless management, update manager etc.. through the systray gadget which loads all the gnome systray stuff and the ability to use nautilus or any other gnome app I want though Enlightenment does pretty much everything I need in 30MB or so of memory.
Gnome is pretty much unusable on Eeepc I have, the system monitor uses 25% CPU and I'm disappointed in how it is bloating. We need Gnome lite
Always leave room to add an explanation if it doesn't work out.