Been meaning to mention this for quite a while, but just never seemed to have time.
As I said before I used Easy Linux (yukky name etc etc), which was fine as it goes, nice interface and so on, on my eeepc. However, the boot time (like most of the 8.x series of Ubuntu)was pretty slow and GNOME is a heavy desktop for a netbook.
So I decided I wanted something lighter, and that meant the easiest route was to ignore most of the “popular” distro as this always come with heavy desktops. Arch Linux therefore came to mind as I’d used it in the past and very much liked it. Arch Linux would allow me to install exactly what I wanted and nothing else.
So, which desktop? Well, I wanted a degree of functionality, so Fluxbox was out, and XFCE is very nice, but, franky, I’ve used it for years at work so wanted something else. E17 therefore seemed the best option.
Right, so installing it. Easy. There is a guide on the Arch Wiki on how to do this, and I was up and running, console wise anyway, pretty quickly. X was another question. That took quite awhile to get up and running as allowing X to guess didn’t work, so had to hand hack a confg which I’m out of practise with. But got that running eventually.
E17 is a geat desktop and I’m glad I made that my desktop. It is amazingly lightweight, but still provides the functions I need on a netbook. If you haven’t looked at it, do.
Now I have a netbook that boot in less than 20 seconds, and a desktop that looks and works great.
Arch Linux is how I remember, utterly flexible, allow you to build a system the way you want, and I recommend it highly
