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Thanks Linus72. Was away from the box a bit. The ISO image is only 686MB. Fully installed with all sorts of open contributions it runs to about 3.8 GB. Apparently the main reason for it being "slow" is the ext4 file system's journalling. This can be switched off - also desirable since it apparently causes hard drives to fail prematurely.
Google fedora aspire (sic). Click on the link to The Road to Elysium. About 5-6 down from the top. This site has all sorts of good things Linux.
Purely by personal preference I would like not to install everything offered by the default installation, but I've not really seen speed issues even for a 1.3 Ghz CPU. Then again, I do not do graphics/gaming.
Personally I still battle to get rid of the Windows mentality of bigger is better. (Marketing ploy for higher sales? making use of bragging rights?) Saw a very sensible article about buying the right size PC for your target applications. It seems that on the counterpane cutting and stripping for size and speed can become something of an objective in it's own right.
Somehow I never forget my software intsructor's words; he was a real solid common sense Brit, when we were learning to do Fortran 4 line coding: "A computer is only a very quick idiot, it does what you tell it to do, not what you mean it to do".
ive just installed Enlightenment on ubuntu and i can say that the next version of OpenGeu will be really good for netbooks, well englightenment in general just can be customised to give you that screen space that is lacking from 10.2" monitors.
I know you can also do that with other distros but there are good features on it so you can add more and get a better working desktop
Yes I tried out 8.2/8.5... I didn't experience some of the difficulties/confusion you mention in your tutotial, everything went smoothly. But when I went to connect to my wireless router configured for WPA... no dice. WEP only! How could they leave something so obvious out? Puppy has the same problem (and wpa supplicant doesn't work reliably so it's not really a fix). And in the later version, finding+adding+making the right driver work is like pulling teeth.
Too bad... I would have left it on for at least a while to give it a fair chance... it seemed pretty fast... but without security, no way.
Jolicloud doesn't seem to need invitation today but is still pre beta but works well on my Acer D250.
Wired LAN and Wireless both works and that is not usual. Linux Mint and a special remastered Ubuntu 9.10 did work too but no other AFAIK.
I guess all three are a kind of Ubuntu or based on Ubuntu.
PreBeta is a candied-up word for Alpha. We really should refer to it as alpha. And btw, they are dropping Prism in favor of google driven app instead... so don't invest too much time tweaking it until they release another pre-beta and start all over again testing things.
You may miss the Synaptic package manager we have all come to love... and the fact that it slows down to the speed of a crippled turtle when you start to connect it to net apps which I have tried before uninstalling it. Perhaps Google will have more bandwidth and power to deliver speed with their resources, once their OS is released. But trying Jolicloud has showed me just how dependent we are when using web apps... and it wasn't a nice feeling.
Funny thing... although the look and feel are very similar to Jolicloud and eeebuntu, EasyPeasy and Leeenux don't control the touchpad very well (at least not on my eeePC)... but they and have that wonderful package manager.
Here is another one its called MeeGo I have tried it on my EEEpc 1000h and it works fine.
From the MeeGo page: "System Requirements
* CPU: Intel Atom or Intel Core 2 CPU (support for SSSE3)
Note: MeeGo will not work on non-SSSE3 CPUs"
Not exactly what we had in mind for a netbook... in the netbook section they give the specs for a full power laptop.
In their marketing hype they make it look like it's developed for low spec ultra-efficient devices and then they contradict themselves in the specs. Of course, if intel sticks their nose into an OS they have an incentive to favor their own processors to the detriment of generic ones.
How about Make Your Own? Build it with live-helper or make a remastersys one if you wanna know both I'll tell you
That's a great idea. But with all due respect, the vast majority of computer users aren't computer hobbyists. For this reason, I feel that we should concentrate on recognizing the work done by a team on a distro, and who support it and continue to improve it. There are enough distros out there... surely one of those teams who have a tiny fast distro will step up to the plate and fix whatever may be deficient to make it suitable for low power but modern hardware - and we're talking at least wifi and screen brightness, at the very minimum, and preferably also working webcam, sound, and voip (skype).
The way I see it, is that if seasoned Linux experts like those developing Puppy and Slitaz can't get wifi working seamlessly and painlessly, how can you even fantacize that all beginners owning netbooks will succeed in making their own distro, and one that resolves the shorcomings of those developed by experts?
The first seems to be a pupplet in development, but I'll check out Puppeee once again... too many changes in one direction, then steps backwards, had discouraged me from sticking with it - what's more - some of the changes made it's wifi chipset management as bad as the regular puppy again. As for other "pupplets", I recently tried about a dozen of them (the ones repertoired at puppylinux.org), and although there are a few really enticing ones, they all share the same deficient wifi chipset detection and antiquated and unnecessary network "profiles". In a day and age where even Ubuntu and many other major distros no longer give you an issue with auto-detection and auto-configuration of wifi, this is really not suitable.
EDIT:
Just tried Puppeee RC6 - Jemimah made the wifi chipset in an eee autodetected, but the old profiles are still there - at least it works. There are many bugs though, and I've advised her of the ones I uncovered in my 20 minutes of using it.
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And btw, they are dropping Prism in favor of google driven app instead... so don't invest too much time tweaking it until they release another pre-beta and start all over again testing things. 
