Use Adafruit’s Occidentalis distro as your base system. It has all neat stuff done for you (sshd running pi/raspberry). It also includes wlan driver for Asus USB-N10 USB WLAN-adapter (which is great and goes through one celement floor).

Make your system up to date by running this command sequence:

rm /etc/ssh/ssh_host_* && dpkg-reconfigure openssh-server
apt-get -y update
apt-get -y install locales
apt-get -y install ntpdate
ntpdate uk.pool.ntp.org
apt-get -y install ntp fake-hwclock
rpi-update
apt-get -y dist-upgrade

Make a temp filesystem to store logs and all running stuff. Add this row to /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs nodev,nosuid,size=50M 0 0

Edit /etc/rsyslog.conf and replace all /var/log/ instances with /var/tmp/

One last warning: Your SD card WILL corrupt some day if you don’t do a proper shutdown. Make a backup of your SD card when it’s all set up! If you don’t believe: try it. It’s the nature of SD card that makes this and there’s no easy way out.