Linux for Netbooks

We’ve been expanding our reading to include a variety of new information sources daily. After our recent thoughts on netbooks, we did a little research and found out that Knoppix released a new version last month.

We admire Knoppix, which was the original bootable live Linux CD, and did a lot to advance the cause. Now every distribution offers a live CD, but Knoppix is still known for its flexibility. Recently, Dmitri Popov of Linux Magazine said that due to its excellent hardware detection, blazingly fast boot process, and the lightweight LXDE desktop environment(which we previously mentioned), Knoppix 6.0 makes a perfect distro for netbooks.

Even though it isn’t designed specifically for netbooks, Knoppix can be installed to a USB key and offers a variety of boot options that would work. Also, the replacement of KDE with LXDE lightens the load considerably. Popov follows up in an additional article here. In that article, one of the commenters points out that most standard distributions are not optimized for the Atom processor, nor are they customized for the Solid State Drives(SSD) common on some systems.

Solid State Drives are limited in the number of writes compared to a conventional hard drive, but offer fast reads. Originally the primary drive type in netbooks, they have been replaced with more convention hard drives due to various problems in their longevity and reliability. One only need to read reviews of these items over at Newegg to see some complaints, leading us to believe that until further notice, SSD drives should not be relied on as a primary drive. There are ways to partition your drives to reduce wear, however.

A few distributions customized for netbooks are available. Easy Peasy is a customized distribution of Ubuntu for netbooks. Ubuntu has a Netbook Remix shipped with several netbooks based on the Moblin Project. The Moblin Project, sponsored by Intel, aims to create a netbook OS based on Linux and optimized for its Atom processor. Intel switched from an Ubuntu to a Fedora base for the project, claiming the move to Fedora was largely a “technical decision based on the desire to adopt RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) for package management” instead of Ubuntu’s Debian DEB extension. RPM offers the advantage of containing license information, thereby enabling developers to create collections of software by license type or exclude software by license type.

An alternative is Eeebuntu, another customized Ubuntu distribution specifically for the Eee, possessing a custom kernel for those machines. For additional distributions, check out Linux Netbook, or similiar sites.  Our favorite distribution, Fedora, is behind, although there is a SIG for Fedora Mini, which may pop up as a future spin. They are already focused on reducing dependencies so Fedora could fit into the smallest space possible for netbooks, mobile internet devices, and possibly future set top box hardware.

We look forward to more, as more distributions create optimized versions for the Atom Processors and special spins designed to work with these netbooks. Keep reading.

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