Laptop and big lump open in Gnome, under Debian.
Last time I used Gnome (admittedly a while ago), you could add a program to be run at startup in
System -> Preferences -> Sessions -> Startup Programs tab
or maybe
System -> Preferences -> Startup Applications
something like that.
You could add a line to run your favourite text editor at startup with a particular text file loaded:
gedit ~/mytextfile.txt
This would cause gedit to run with that file loaded, every time you logged into Gnome.
Eee opens in Asus Tellytubbies desktop.
Not sure I can help with that, as I don't have one. Isn't the Eee operating system a custom version of Xandros which runs IceWM?
Looks like some useful info here:
http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:startupscript
Sounds like you need to put the same sort of text editor launch command in ~/.icewm/startup, though you'll have to experiment with it to be sure.
Peter.