whistler’s blog

Linux is a great operating system to run on a netbook. There are many linux distributions available made specially for netbooks, but running a standard lightweight distribution is a good idea. I will not take sides, but Xubuntu, Debian and Arch are good choices. What matters more is what desktop environment you are using. Gnome and KDE are excellent desktops, no matter how much better they are then windows, they still consume a lot of resources. There are a lot of lightweight desktop environments like fluxbox, icewm, but they either look ugly or are not that user friendly.

What comes in between is xfce. Not too heavy and not too light, just right. It can give you an exact gnome look(default Xubuntu install) with a lesser memory footprint. But I actually prefer the default xfce desktop. I dont like some of the default xfce applications: I prefer gnome-terminal over xfce-terminal and gedit over mousepad, but this is not a problem, you can install gnome or kde applications without a problem.

On your netbook, you have limited screen space, so two panels doesnt make sense. Instead Gnome-Do should be used to launch applications. And unless you are doing some hardcore programming on your netbook, you don’t even need that single panel except for the notification tray. I like making that notification tray auto hide and dock it on the right side of my screen instead of top or bottom. Two reasons for that, firstly it takes less space when open and also, the screen width is more than the height.

Keyboard shortcuts should be set up according to your liking. The tilda key opens up a terminal for me, which is really useful. I also have a shortcut to show desktop, windows+space opens up gnome-do. If the touchpad doesn’t work well, use gsynaptics to tweak it, for me I have to dig deeper and use synclient(command line) to get the best out of my touchpad.

And of course, customize your theme, wallpaper, icons, cursors, window decorator, splash screens to personalize your netbook and make it truly yours.