Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Best netbook distro--opinions, anyone?

 

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 02:58:57AM -0000, dbneeley wrote:
> Well, I now have two new machines in my possession temporarily--my own new one and an Asus 1005PA netbook. This puppy has an Atom 450 processor, integrated graphics, a 250 GB hard drive, and I have already upped the RAM to its maximum of 2 GB. I'll only have it for three weeks or so, as it is destined for my stepson in Ukraine. Meanwhile, though, I thought it might be interesting to play with a netbook distro or two--I now have it dual booting with Kubuntu Netbook Edition, which I'm not yet sure I like.
>
I gave my wife standard Ubuntu, and removed the bottom panel. I'm not a
big fan of the netbook/meego/moblin layouts, but that might just be me
being oldfashion.

Jeff will probably chime in with a vote for #!Crunchbang, which, in
lighter moments, I've called ArchLinux for busy people (which is a
highly inaccurate description, but those who've used both probably get
it).

My own netbook usually has Fedora, as the job I have is RH system based,
and I usually throw on Ubuntu so that I can help my wife if she has an
issue. (The first thing I do is wipe Windows off it, and usually use it
to test various interesting seeming distributions.)

If you're less experienced, something Mint might be good. If you're
more experienced, and into minimalism, you can use Fedora with a minimal
installation, or even their LXDE edition, which is certainly usable,
even for the less experienced. My own taste is for the *box Window
Managers, fluxbox and openbox, however, many others will prefer a full
desktop environment, such as KDE or Gnome-or xfce for a lighter weight
one--then, there is, as mentioned LXDE, which is lighter still, but
still pretty fully functional.

You could give it a try with the Ubuntu live CD (and even on the live
CD, you can delete the bottom panel, which you'll find gives you a lot
more room. Fedora tends to break frequently. Puppy, though very light
weight isn't for everyone. (I find that their network wizards never
work properly for a hidden wireless network).

You could poke around distrowatch--if you click on a distribution's
name, it will often give, among other things, a screen shot.

I have FreeBSD on my 1000HE, but it took more work to get it going than
it did with any of the mainstream Linux distributions.

--
Scott Robbins
PGP keyID EB3467D6
( 1B48 077D 66F6 9DB0 FDC2 A409 FA54 EB34 67D6 )
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys EB3467D6

Spike: It's a big rock. Can't wait to tell my friends. They
don't have a rock this
big.

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