Any Experience with Netbooks?

[Tellos Athenaios]

No experience; but still a piece of advice you may want to take into account:
Keyboards probably aren't the problem if your hands aren't too big, however screen real-estate *is*. You'll notice with websites that many of the more `large amounts of text' types do seem to be based around the idea of a _minimum_ of 1024*768. Unless you plug in an external (USB) mouse which has rather good low-friction scrolling (as opposed to the incremental model of nearly all mice) that may be a bit annoying with N-page documents (with N any amount larger than 2).

It's not just that your screen is particularly small. It is also that unless you get yourself an OS tuned to a netbook (if I were you and I were to get a netbook anytime soon, I'd most definitely try out Moblin for that: if only for the fact that its a heavily optimised Linux for the Intel netbooks: 5seconds for a cold boot to desktop is not bad at all) you will notice that all aplications love to take up some X amount of vertical and screen-real estate, with X likely being about 50px for anything that supports tabs, and in the vicinity of ~100-150px for things that use the 'ribbon' thing or uses many layers of toolbars (so that is many common office applications right there).

I find myself noticing that on a 1280x800 laptop screen: I have my desktop configured to trays, task bars etc... If you want to do anything like displaying 2 Word documents side by side, it's going to be mildly unpleasant I'd expect. It takes a fair amount of re-sizing already on what is a much more convenient resolution of 1280px in width.

[Xiahou]

Anyone ever play with putting an alternative Linux Distro on the eeePC? I'm kind of sick of the Xandros install that it comes with. The interface feels too constricting and everything is so far out of date that it's a real problem to do something as simple as update flashplayer.

First, I downloaded Mandriva (my current distro of choice). I had read that it had good compatibility with netbook hardware and it's a distro I feel familiar with. However, when it came to getting it to boot a live install from a USB flash drive, I ran into problems- of course there are fixes for it, but it started to feel like I was shoe-horning something onto it that really didn't belong there.

So now, I'm looking at Easy Peasy and Eeebuntu, both are Ubuntu variants. It's basically a coin toss, so I asked my wife which she thought looked nicer... I'll be trying Easy Peasy first.

If anyone has experience with these or any other distros on a netbook, let me know.

[Husar]

That Easy Peasy looks sexy, if I had a netbook I'd want to try it.

[Xiahou]

That Easy Peasy looks sexy, if I had a netbook I'd want to try it.

It looked great... but too much didn't work out of the gate. I wanted a distro that worked from the getgo with minimal frustration. Eeeubuntu fit the bill.

For both I did the live test running it off a USB drive. For Easy Peasy, things like LCD brightness controls, the mute button- and most importantly wifi did not work when testing the live version... pretty disappointing for a distro that supposed to be designed for netbooks. With Eeeubuntu, everything I tried worked- so the choice was clear.

I've already got it installed and running- it installs right from the live version as its running and I'm able to do everything I could under the old install. Now it just runs much snappier and its a proper, full featured OS.