I've recently been doing something similar: I have a UbiSurfer 9, a netbook using an S3C2416 chip as its CPU, running the ARMv5 instruction set, and with 128MB of DDR2 memory. Its original operating system is WinCE 6.0, and I'm trying to run Linux on it. The good news is that Debian still maintains the armel architecture, so we potentially have a large number of userspace programs available. The bad news is there's no suitable kernel and bootloader. Fortunately, a friend helped me write a bootloader and modified the kernel source code to make it work. Running a Debian system is possible, but quite slow, so I created a minimal system with only Busybox[1], and it works perfectly.

[1]: https://github.com/chirsz-ever/busybox-linux

I'm still exploring this; related information is in this repository, written in Chinese:

https://github.com/chirsz-ever/ubisurfer9