Hi
Only been using WattOS for a couple of days, but loving it already. I've been using Jolicloud on my Asus eeepc 4G for quite a while, but found it a bit slow & had pretty poor battery life (so much so I thought th battery was knackered!).
Tried all sorts of other distros, but all had drawbacks. Slitaz & Puppy are small & fast, but a bit too basic, missing things like suspending when you close the laptop lid.
Tried the 'Buntus, which used to work quite well, but none really support installing on a 4gb harddrive anymore, even Lubuntu.
I'm intigued by ChromeOS, love the simplicity, but hardware support isn't really up to scratch as yet, even in Hexxah's spins, so I wanted to find a distro that was fast, small, & uptodate.
While searching forums to find a way of installing a cut down version of Lubuntu, I found a post recommending WattOS, which I'd never heard of. 30mins later the eeepc was up & running, all hardware working perfectly, & disc space to spare.
Have to say I very impressed. WattOS is simple but polished, just what I needed.
Thanks alot
Bill
I'm using an EeePc as well. This netbook was as quiet as a mouse before, and now it is as quiet as a quiet mouse sleeping. I haven't yet found anything that doesn't work. My wireless isn't sorted out yet, but my card (AR9285) is supported. So it's just a matter of time I guess.
I was pleased to abandon Windows for Linux again. But Ubuntu was just a bit sluggish. Also it takes up screen real estate, which is a problem on such a tiny computer. With WattOS, the task bar minimizes, and it bounces back very quickly. And there aren't two information blocks taking up space. Why other distros think it necessary to have a bar on the top, plus a task bar, is beyond me.
I experimented with the Ubuntu HUD. I found it distracting to have to think about the matches it was producing. It wasn't anything like commands at the speed of thought. It's a nice idea and may work for some, but I think it's better to know your software and where things are in it. I think getting-out-of-the-way is the path of the future. But, the HUD designers probably would argue that the whole point of HUD is to clear the way for work. Oh well! Can't win that one.
Whisper quiet, seems solid, although I haven't really challenged it yet. For example I couldn't say whether it stays cool when processing data for hours on end. But presumably you've tested that already. Everything is very snappy. Menus, program closures, most program openings, no dilly-dallying wait-I'll-draw-it-for-you, whatever they're always doing. Just bang, there it is.
After seeing how smoothly WattOS ran on my daughter's Aspire 110, I tried to run it from live USB on my old eeepc 2G Surf. Very nice, but better still when I installed it onto an SD card. Now it's given new life to a netbook which must be at least 400 years old in computer years (I bought it in the spring of '08). Wireless worked straight off, the display actually looked good, and there was plenty of screen room to do stuff.
My only complaint is that I can't read this forum properly, as the line endings get clipped on the (otherwise quite adequate) 800x480 pixel display. A bit ironic, that.
@teejay:
The maximum screen resolution on the 2G Surf is 800x480, and there's nothing I can do about it except hope that most sites I visit have fluid or at least forgiving layouts. Changing the browser's font size is pointless as well, as the problem is how the text (already quite small) behaves when a small-screen user scrolls horizontally across the page.
Speaking as a web designer, I'm guessing that the problem on this site has to do with how background images are used in CSS to create a fake matching-column layout. While I can scroll the fulll width of the page (somewhere between 900 and 960 px, I guess) text becomes obscured by the tiled background image around the 800px mark. This affects the main content div and also the decorative background at page top. A quick and dirty fix for this problem may be to specify a lower z-index for the offending div (and a higher z-index for the content div).
But all this is secondary to the fact that I love what WattOS can do on a 7-inch screen and not a lot of power.