Beartooth wrote: >> Why do you want CentOS on an EeePC ? > > I have a strong if perhaps irrational preference for the .rpm > family Me, too, and it's rational in my case. I've experienced the whole range of both sets of tools, from the ground up. RPMs are simpler to build than DEBs, and an rpm/yum-based system is easier to maintain than a dpkg/apt-based one, considering just packaging issues. It's true that I have many more years experience with RPM based systems, but I've been using Ubuntu now for about a year and a half, and my opinion isn't shifting much any more. I think much of the hype about how great the Debian packaging system is came from the days before they adopted yum, so Debian fans could point to apt-get and say "Isn't it great to be able to install packages from the net directly from the command line?" Sure, once upon a time it was, but today, the main distinction I draw between the two sets of tools is that the Debian tools are more complex with no compensating benefit. (There are even some things the simpler Red Hattish tools can do that the Debian ones can't, easily. rpm -qa, for one.) But, enough of the advocacy rant. Though I use CentOS far more often than I do Ubuntu, there are a few places where Ubuntu simply works better. One of those places is on my Eee 1000. Take it from an RPM fan: it's a poor reason to prefer CentOS for your netbook, unless your goal is to feed patches back to Red Hat for future versions of the OS. > speed of boot becomes a major criterion. Ubuntu 9.04 greatly improved the boot speed relative to previous versions of the OS. Separate from that effort, but speeding disk-heavy activities like booting still further, Ubuntu 9.04 also includes ext4 support. You have to partition manually to enable it, but I recommend that for netbooks anyway because that's also the only way to avoid having a swap partition. Swapping to flash is loony. Between these improvements and a few tweaks to the automatic service startup list, my 1000 goes from the BIOS screen to a desktop in under a minute. I'm running the netbook remix version. Ubuntu 9.04 supports the Eee's power management features, too, so you can sleep it and wake it back up reasonably quickly.