[HLUG] Linux for Netbook

[Paul Stenning]

Hi all,

Can anyone suggest good Linux distros to look at for an Eee PC 900 
netbook?  It has 800 x 480 graphics, 512MB RAM, 4GB Flash Drive, slow 
Celeron CPU and Intel graphics.

I am currently using Ubuntu (the latest LTS) and am getting frustrated 
with it.  I seem to spend more time updating it than using it, it has 
hardly any disk space left (I need to clear space for every update) even 
though it's a minimal installation, it seems to hammer the CPU so it 
runs warm with poor battery life, and it's slow.

I need something more lightweight that will work sensibly on the 
hardware (especially the screen resolution), can run recent versions of 
Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice Write and Calc (or Abiword and 
Gnumeric) and aMSN.  It also needs to have support for a Vodafone 3G dongle.

Suggestions welcome, before I throw the thing out of the window or 
restore the original dire Linux and sell it!!

I think Ubuntu have lost their edge now.  I "upgraded" my development 
web server from 8.04LTS to 10.04LTS and the result was a right mess, 
including loss of the RAID array containing all my work.  Thankfully I 
had backed everything up (I do nightly backups).  I am now using Apache, 
PHP and MySQL on my Windows XP desktop and may reconsider the server 
when I have time (though the current setup is working fine so I may 
stick with it).

-- 

Best regards,
Paul Stenning

S&P Technology

www.sp-tech.co.uk
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