lightwheight distro for netbooks.

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as the title suggests i am looking for a new lightwheight distro to use on the aspire one i recently received.

currently i am using ubuntu netbookk edition 10.x, with metacity replaced with openbox as the window manager (felt like a doubling of speed)
now i have heard that gnome can be resource heavy, as can ubuntu, so is there any lightwheight distros i should try to see if i can get even better performance?

Damn Small Linux works well, and is the fastest Distro out there in my opinion, but on some machines the touchpad won't work, and there is not a way to get to a terminal (that is apparent to me) without a mouse. Wll run on a 486 with 16 meg of RAM. It's a 50 meg download, and is debian based.

Next is puppy linux, which supports pretty much every piece of hardware out there. I have run it on a 400mhz cpu with 128 meg RAM, and it was reasonably fast. The only downside is that you have (or had to) compile java from source because the java installer from the repo is/was corrupted, and it can't do debian packages.

Both can be installed from USB with the Universal USB Installer, but if you have ubuntu on a netbook you probably already knew that.

Links:

Damn Small Linux
Puppy Linux
Universal USB Installer

I have barely used Puppy Linux, but it is lightweight. Aside from that, there is a project called Linux From Scratch, which covers building a distro in a step-by-step guide. It could potentially give better performance, although factoring-in the build time may be a negative. I have spent at least 20 hours following the project, without making much progress, but I am quite inexperienced in using Linux.

I am wondering how you are finding the Aspire One, and what the particular model and specifications are? I have been considering buying one, as my laptop failed last month.

If he's using ubuntu, there's a good chance he's not up for that. Even so, there's Arch, which is the same thing, but has a much larger community. As for 'lightweight' distros, there's Jolicloud if you don't mind being chained to the internet. There's also Fedora LXDE.

I've been using Xubuntu 11.04 on an eee pc 1005HA. It uses XFCE, but is still kind of slow.

i dont know,
i have been custom building an opensuse distro using susestudio but that is mainly package configuration. (gonna use it for experimenting with building python clients for sql interactions, need a server without too much extra)

i also work with SME server, a very easy to use server distro with the added bonus of immense flexibility through the terminal.


the aspire one definately has read issues, then again it is the zg5(quite old) so that might be the issue.
decreasing swappability of the ssd did help a lot but everytime it has to maipulate files it starts comitting suicide (in the metaphorical sense), i might try using a 16gb sd card instead of the ssd.

i was actually looking at arch before but i havent used any debian based distros yet, (might remember wrong about it being debian based).

I'm using Debian on my Aspire One. KDE 4 kind of takes awhile to start, which I'm sort of annoyed by, but have been to lazy to do anything about. You could try a lighter weight desktop like XFCE or just go with a window manager.

Arch is definitely not Debian based, but I've heard lots of good things about it and I've been thinking about using it sometime relatively soon. It's very much a do-it-yourself kind of distro, but it has a very active and friendly community around it (or it did last I checked).

Zenwalk is a pretty good lightweight distro. I used it for quite a long time on a very old laptop that just didn't have enough RAM to fit most other distros. I don't know how it is for hardware compatibility on netbooks, but it does run quite well on hardware less powerful than a netbook, so (barring possible hardware driver issues) it might be worth a look.

0Im using Kubunutu on my Acer Aspire One D25-.
Kubuntu is a great OS and it runs very well on very little.
Im using it on another machine and it works like a dream:
1GB of DDR2 Ram
Intel Atom Dual Core 1.6
Nvidia ION 117

Puppy 4.30 (much faster than puppy 5) or debian net install and just install what you need.

okay so i did a little reading and i think my plan is as follows.

i will try both zenwalk and arch, they both offer very similar features and have a similar design philosophy, then i can compare them to the UNE distro i am using now,

i will report back or write up a comparative of the performance, i should probably try out ubuntu with XFCE and openbox as well (or i might just install xubuntu)

if i had the time i would try more distros but i have plenty to do.

I would recommend either Lubuntu 10.04 (Ubuntu 10.04LTR using the LXDE Desktop Environment) or Crunchbang, which is even lighter using OpenBoxWM. --I'm quite biased against KDE, and the new GNOME Shell, which are both resource hogs due to their compositing elements.