Looks like I'm stuck with Jaunty on the EeePC

I have already mentioned that YouTube doesn't play in Opera 10 in Ubuntu Jaunty on the EeePC 901 for reasons that are not at all clear.
Given that I really haven't noticed any major improvement in going from Hardy to Jaunty (I skipped Ibex principally because I couldn't get Yakuake to work well in this latter), I decided today to go back to Hardy and at least have the Distro that I use most on this box fully-functional.
But no such luck !!!
The version of Hardy I had installed before was 8.04.1 and had no problems with this.
However, this doesn't seem to be available at all now. So I tried 8.04.2 from here.
Used Unetbootin to make a LIveUSB from this which I was able to use to install this version of Hardy.
Everything seemed fine except for no wifi connection. This seemed to be due to no rt2860 driver for the Ralink card being available. Hmm, that's strange.
So, I thought about downloading the rt2860 source and compiling my own driver. For this I needed a wired connection. Amazingly, I couldn't get a wired connection either -- absolutely nothing.
Just don't understand this but seems like the 2.6.24.13-generic kernel is incomplete.
I even tried going back to the 2.6.24.11-eee kernel but this errored out on bootup due to lack of appropriate drivers in /lib/modules/2.6.24-11-eee/.....
So, no choice but to go back to Jaunty.
No problem going back but still no YouTube in Opera 10 (although it works fine in FireFox). I posted to the Opera forum about this although, truthfully, I don't expect there is a solution.
Just for completeness, I should mention that I do NOT want to use the Netbook Remix version of 9.04. I tried this in Hardy and it came across to me as Linux trying to be like Windows. Well, I don't like Windows and don't want anything that even remotely looks like it. I like REAL Linux and want to stick with that. I like its "rawness" and don't want need any cutsified versions that might appeal to Windows users.