I have no ide if this can help at all, but I found my old notes from last time I did some kernel module compilation:
First of all one need to open up for the installation of individual program packages in the server-manager panel.
Then it is to choose the right repositories from the server-manager panel.
This will affect also the options that is available from shell.
I went into Linux shell via Putty and installed these packages.
1. Go to the server-manager panel and enable the yum function (program installer)
2. yum install kernel-devel Kernel-headers
3. yum install gcc
4. yum install cvs
5. yum install openssl-devel
I believe this should work for most purposes.
Maybe it have to be "adjusted" or updated in some way, I don't know.
By the way for some days ago I sendt in a modification proposal for uptimizing the SME server for such "light hardware" and virtual environments. The idea was to reduce the memory and load from Apache web server and to turn off some services like Squid and Samba. I tested this "internet-server-only" variant running quite ok on only 64 MB RAM. (But the EEE box should be powerfull enough to run and support the full SME server installation.)
By the way, installing a development environment is considered to be a sequrity risk, so it should be removed after the compilation of source code has been done.