I recently started trying out various linux distributions that will work on my mother’s netbook. The Acer Aspire One came bundled with WinXP, which has recently started becoming really slow. So, I started experimenting with lightweight distributions installed on my usb drive.
First, I tried Puppy, and it worked out fine to an extent, except Xorg crashed after a few hours of use. Then, I switched to Slax, the installation was really just a matter of extracting the tarball and running a script to mark the usb drive as bootable. But, Slax had a tendency of hanging up and corrupting my flash drive, which it did multiple times.
Finally, I came across #!Crunchbang Linux on the Arch forums. It’s a Ubuntu based distribution (though the future versions will be based on Debian). It uses the Openbox window manager and I pair it with the fantastic PyTyle so that it suits my tastes.
Anyways, here’s a screeny
Crunchbang screenshot