I decided to wipe eeebuntu 8.04 from my eee pc 901. I have put on archlinux which turns out to be great! you have a lot more control of ur installation with archie, and i’ve gone for a very lightweight approach to suit my netbook. No desktop environment, just using openbox window manager, and carefully chosen each application to get exactly what i want.
A non-exhaustive list-
Programs)
Terminal: roxterm (mainly), xterm
Editor: vim (general), geany (IDE)
Network Manager: wicd (great! ncurses+GUI)
File Manager: pcmanfm (weaning myself off nautilus) nautilus, mc (ncurses)
Video Player: mplayer (no fancy GUI for me, plenty of shortcut keys) smplayer(FTW!)
[Video Editor: avidemux-gtk]
Music Player: audacious (haven’t looked into this much seems ok screen space wise)(great!)
Office: openoffice, epdfview
Archive: xarchiver
Graphics: gimp, mirage [added eog as mirage a bit slow]
Browser: lynx, firefox (main), chromium
System)
Window Manager: openbox
Wallpaper: set with feh (extremely lightweight!)
System info: conky & tint2 various tray apps
Tray/Panel/Dock: tint2 lxpanel
Compositing Manager (transparency, effects): xcompmgr
Audio: alsa, alsa-utils (alsamixer)
GUI Configurators: obconf, obmenu, tint2conf
That’s all i can think of right now.
TODO:
Network shares are not mounting automatically for some reason [-requires root?], [or SD card]
haven’t thought about bluetooth,must work on speeding up boot process (no autodetecting modules really speeds things up). [never switch off/reboot]Must setup scripts to move ~/.mozilla folder to RAM on system start, and sync to disk on system shutdown. [Done! But for aforementioned reason sync it with cronjob, and logging in or out of bash for good measure. Use rsync as it just updates changes to disk rather than full copy (good for SSD drive)].
Otherwise coming together nicely.
Click for screenshot of 9.1 inch screen:
Have since dicked around with a custom minimal gtk theme, made the windows title bars as small as possible to save screen real estate -may just ditch em all together and use shortcut keys? Every program has been visually miniaturized as much as reason would allow.
Conky now calls a script that reads battery level values from the filesystem and colours the battery display accordingly, e.g. red below 5%.
TODO: add functionality to the script to send notifications and suspend2ram. Need to keep it simple as script is called every ~2 secs.