Prior to buying my new eee pc, I thought I'd finally gotten the ol' Linux thing figured out. I liked having a desktop chock full of bells and whistles and visual effects and nautilus-integrated apps. I used Mint with the AWN dock and a truckload of Compiz Fusion effects on my enormous, relatively-powerful laptop, and it did every single thing I could think of for it to do.

Then I got the eee, which is handy for things like conferences because of its exceptional battery life (and here, I'm talking about the 1000HE). Naturally, it came with Windows XP, and naturally, I barely had it on by the time I had dived into research into what distro to use to replace it.

I ran through a few: the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which didn't work with the peculiarly-kitted 1000HE (even Jaunty!); Easy Peasy, which worked fairly well but still had flaky hardware support, but most importantly and most paradigm-shiftingly, I used Cruncheee (http://crunchbanglinux.org).

Crunchbang Linux is a really, really fantastic distro. I can't possibly recommend it highly enough. It's clean, thoughtful, and aesthetically pleasing in a minimalist way. Unfortunately, Cruncheee had the same problems in dealing with the eccentric hardware of the 1000HE compared to the other eee models.

Once I had a taste of that Openbox magic, though, I couldn't get away. After hearing about Mandriva's 2009.1 release, which was built with notebooks particularly in mind (as well as with a host of other improvements, naturally), I decided to give it a whirl.

Mandriva's GNOME release has a frankly alarming amount of goodies, and I enjoy drak tools folded into the distro. The hardware support for the 1000HE was perfect--perhaps due to the fact that it came out a few weeks after Jaunty's UNR edition, or perhaps Mandriva simply deals better with hardware this time around. Either way, I was extremely pleased, but the speed seemed just a bit lacking.

Mandriva, of course, offers a great idea when you're dealing with netbooks--use LXDE (which, of course, uses Openbox as its window manager). The LXDE implementation in the task-lxde metapackage in Mandriva is pretty gnome-like, apart from the obvious (PCMan instead of Nautilus, but mostly you still use GTK apps), but with a little bit of configuration, you can end up with something fairly Crunchbang-esque.

It's snappy, it's clean and it's tiny. The hardware is supported through-and-through--right down to the fairly notoriously quirky webcam included in the 1000HE.

I've decided to remove my Mint partition on the larger desktop and replace it with Crunchbang. The fact that you can right-click on the desktop or throw down a keyboard shortcut and get access to the menu is one that has changed my whole computing experience (even though, I know, it's been easy to do that on a lot of DEs for some time). I can't even imagine mousing over to a start button or even to a dock any more. I feel so much more efficient and productive, and all the while, I get to enjoy an almost stark minimalist aesthetic. Nice!

When was the exact moment I realized I'd fallen for Openbox? I guess when I realized that while my Mint desktop did everything I could think of for it to do, so did my LXDE desktop.

If you're interested in doing something similar with your Mandriva installation, I'll include a few links below.

Window decoration:
http://www.box-look.org/content/show.php/Laza?content=64954

GTK 2+ theme:
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/gommapiuma+looks+(gummina+mod)?content=69913

Wallpaper:
Can't remember where I found it; if you know, let me know.
http://jonnydover.com/images/ice-comet.jpg

I hope you'll fall in love with Openbox's elegant simplicity, but even if you don't think you'll like it, I suggest you try it out. It might give you a new perspective in configuring your other environments.