Hello, About a year ago, I bought an Acer Aspire One. I needed a lightweight machine to carry around with me mainly when I visited clients. As most of you know, the distro that's installed by default on it is kinda bad. So for a while I had UNR installed on it, and then a stripped out version of Debian with XFCE4. UNR's GUI didn't appeal to me. And XFCE4 was never designed for smaller screens. So sometimes, I would have a screen come up with buttons that weren't in the screen.
Recently, Moblin 2.1 was released. After seeing screenshots of it, I figured I'd give it a spin. Afterall, the distro was built from the ground up to run on Intel Atom-based netbooks. Screenshots can be found here: http://moblin.org/documentation/moblin-overview/netbook-screenshots On the positive side, it installed faster than anything else I had tried on my AA1. Everything worked out of the box. No need to fiddle to get the hardware running. The GUI is very impressive. I'd even like to run that on my regular laptop. Speed-wise, it's very snappy. Doesn't feel like an under powered machine at all. The distro has so far all the applications I could ever want to run on that machine. On the negative side, well, it doesn't have the plethora of software available on Debian/Ubuntu. My understanding is, they developed from scratch and didn't base it on a pre-existing distro. They chose RPM/Yum as a package manager. It would be very simple to roll out RPM yourself though, and join the development community. Also, by default, it auto logs you in. Something I find strange. Easily fixed though: install gnome-screensaver and you will be prompted for credentials before being able to use the machine. The zones concept is kinda odd at first. Each application runs in it's own virtual desktop. I believe that's because each application is sandboxed. Not a big deal though, you get used to it quickly. Overall, a very satisfying OS for netbooks. The best I've used so far. Highly recommended. -- :(){ :|:& };:
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