A couple of years ago, my son bought an ASUS eeePC 900a. It has the 4 gig SSD drive in it. It originally had linux when he got it, but I don't recall the distro. Shortly after he got it he wanted to put a new distro on it. We loaded up Ubuntu.

But that was a while ago. Now the distro he has on it is getting old. We tried upgrading to a current version of Ubuntu, but the drive is too small.

I've been searching for a suitable distro for this machine. I thought about Cruncheee, but it appears that Crunch Bang has stopped the eee version. Same goes for several of the other eee distros.

So I'm looking for some recommendations to run on this low power netbook.

I know that Puppy is a possibility, but he's tried that but doesn't like the feel.

You dotn need a 'eee' version. Cruchbang should run just fine.

I'd also consider antiX.

crunchbang might be a tad big. My install is about 2.9 GB; about standard with exception of skype being installed.
Add some swap space and there is not much space to play.

Yeah, I know it doesn't have to be an eee version. But the eee versions are geared towards that small screen and low power.

I'll take a look at antiX

We tried out VectorLinux on a Dell netbook and my son liked the looks and feel. So may try that one. Their page has some conflicting info about system requirements for the standard edition. On place is says 2.1 gig, another says 5 gig of drive space. We may just install it and see.

Possibly not a solution you'd consider but if you install a bigger SSD in it, buy one of those little USB sticks designed to be left in permanently or stick an SD card in it then you would have a much bigger choice of distributions. As long as you use LXDE, XFCE or other lightweight desktop environment you should be able to run a lot more distros then.

I've thought about putting in a larger drive. But I can't see putting the extra money into this old computer. It's still a possibility, though. I've never really thought of running off the sd card permanently. The live editions often don't save the settings, so he'd have to put in the wireless password every time and probably some other settings.

If I don't come up with a good distro to use on it, I may just have to put in a new drive or experiment with the sd card.

You can install a normal distro to the SD card in the same way as you install to the SSD -- but you'd need a USB stick to install from.

Okay, I was thinking that booting off a live image on the sd card. Not booting off USB and installing to the sd card.

That is what I would do if it were my machine. I tend to think virtually any distro can be installed in 5-10GB, so adding a 16GB SD would allow you to install anything. I know DEs like KDE and Unity may struggle (how much I'm not sure) but with XFCE or LXDE you'll bee fine.
I'm typing this on an EEE PC 1000 which I think is pretty much the same as the 900a but with bigger screen and more storage capacity and XFCE runs pretty well -- not fast of course but very usable even for things like Google Earth.

Yep, I was planning on a lightweight DE. I like XFCE, but my son hasn't used either, so I'll get him set up with both to try.

Sorry, should have said, I'm running Debian Sid on this but I've had Linux Mint also and that ran fine with the default DE as well as XFCE. Hence my belief that if you get over the lack of storage then any distro will work with a lightweight DE being preferable.

You're probably right. I'll get a 16 gig sd card and give it a shot.

I had this netbook at one time. I used Arch Linux with Xfce on the SSD and that little netbook ran great. All the function keys worked as well.

Since you install from the ground up with Arch, you don't have to worry about large packages such as libreoffice, or other large package getting installed by default. Arch takes some more time to get going, but if you just follow the arch install guide and the arch Xfce guide, you shouldn't have any issues. There's also an Arch eee900a guide as well.

Some applications can be a pain on the eee900a because of the small screen. Hold the Alt key down while mouse dragging in Xfce and you can move windows off-screen to reveal hidden text at the bottom of pages. Works just as well in any DE or WM too.

A friend of mine was using Mint on it. It was running ok