DIY Netbook Linux

There are a variety of netbook distros out there, but you can have a little fun creating your own. Here are some software packages and tips worth considering:

Choosing a distro

You can chose any distro but my favourite is, of course, Ubuntu. The 9.04 release is particularly well-suited to netbooks because it not only works well on most of them, but includes the ultra-quick boot-up technology that will probably mean the desktop appears in about 25 seconds of powering-up. This removes the need to hibernate or suspend the computer each time you've finished with it, which also removes the need for a large swap partition because this is where the hibernate file is stored (my Dell Mini 9 only has a 4GB SD disk, for example, and has 2GB of RAM, so a swap partition is simply impossible).