I finally got around to begin configuring my Asus TP300LA laptop now, and I quickly ran into some trouble I did not expect:

The touchpad just won't work.

Apparently the touchpad is very new and uses some new protocol that's not very well supported by Linux yet. People are hoping we'll get drivers soon, but in the meantime, the outlook is bleak. Some people have reported some fixes, but I haven't been lucky with any of them.

So for the time being, I've switched to Pentadactyl to not have to use the touchpad while browsing the web, and I've bound the context key on the keyboard to middle mouse button (which is a surprisingly common action in my daily use.) The way I did the latter was by running the three commands

xkbset m         # enable mouse clicks by keyboard
xkbset exp =m    # make the previous setting not undo itself after a while
xmodmap -e "keycode 135 = Pointer_Button2"

every time X starts, which means I put them in my .xsession file.

But if the touchpad not working is a total boner killer for you, don't get the TP300LA to run Linux on. Not yet. I'm sure it'll be no problem in a year or so.