The live CD is vary fast and includes Gparted to set up your HD. The installer is the usual Ubuntu one, and includes the option to encrypt /home (important on a laptop).

The software provided included Chromium, Pidgin, Postler (mail), Abiword, Dexter (contacts), Osmo (organiser), Audacious, and Gnome-mplayer. Apart from a warning from Postler, all ran from the CLI with no adverse comments by bash. Codecs and flash are installed and everything worked perfectly, even my "mp4 from hell". There were menu entries for installing video and wireless drivers and Ndiswrapper.

Unlike some LXDE distros, I could set hinting and subpixel smoothing, although keyboard shortcuts still had to be set by editing an undocumented file. The Look changer gives a choice of Windows 2000 (which just looks like LXDE to me) or Mac OS X.

For installing software there are three tools. "Extra software" just gives you a few items: gnumeric, mtpaint, wine, etc. Then there are Synaptic and the Ubuntu Software Centre. The former is more comprehensive (for example, it gives a wine metapackage as well as the separate components) and better at searching.

In the small distro stakes, this just has the edge on Vector Light and Lubuntu. It's generally a little more friendly than AntiX, unless you want to do a lot of configuration.