Question about netbook screens

[Bastien Nocera]

On Fri, 2009-07-24 at 00:08 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 11:40:35PM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> > On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 18:00 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > > Hi Desktop SIG,
> > > 
> > > When I talked to someone with an EeePC today, he told me he wanted to
> > > have Fedora 11 but had to install another OS, because Fedora would
> > > sometimes draw windows whose action areas weren't on the screen, so he
> > > couldn't make button selections.  I don't have a netbook, so I don't
> > > know if or how this problem might be solved, and was hoping someone
> > > could tell me.
> > 
> > Probably an EeePC 7" where running a "normal" desktop is completely
> > absurd. I don't think that any other distros are making particular
> > changes to make that easier.
> 
> Yeah, I don't know about standard desktop editions of common distros,
> but he showed me the unit, running a netbook remix that made a
> specific change that completely alters the desktop.  It hides the
> normal desktop in favor of a menu driven system, and windows that are
> opened are force-maximized (sorry if that's the wrong term).  I'm not
> suggesting that's the right way to go, just wondering if there's
> any potential solution so the standard Fedora runs more acceptably for
> those users.

That's what the Ubuntu Netbook Remix uses (a row and grid menu system
and "maximus" which maximises all the windows, and gets it wrong very
often).

> > Things like disabling the text in toolbars, or selecting smaller fonts
> > would certainly help.
> 
> Strangely enough, one of the more interesting comments I got from
> a couple people was that fonts were legible on their netbooks in
> Fedora 11 (unlike other distros they had tried) because of larger
> fonts!
> 
> > But, really, 800x480?! That's even smaller than the 800x600 that people
> > try not to break.
> 
> Sure -- I'm not saying it's not a difficult problem.  If we had to
> have some sort of special experience for netbooks, would it be
> possible to customize that into something like a schema package that
> reset a bunch of normal defaults?

The story here is probably the Moblin spin that Peter Robinson is
helping build. Right now, he's busy getting the packages into the
distro.