Recently I installed Xubuntu 11.10 on my netbook, however discovered that unless selected in GRUB, the trackpad does not work. I tested different distros with the 3.0.0-12 or higher kernel, and they did not work either. I would be willing to test a 3.1 or higher kernel. I tested the trackpad on Ubuntu 10.10 and it worked, leading me to believe that it is the kernel.
Even if I have got past the touchpad issue, I have read in multiple places that Xubuntu is not very fast for Xfce, so I was looking for a distro which is fast with Xfce. I also need to be able to run a few programs. These are:

Geany, gEdit, and i586-mingw32msvc-gcc

gEdit is a GNOME application, but I use the syntax highlighting, so if there are any more Xfce friendly syntax highlighting text editors, please say.

you could just use ubuntu 10.10 and then install the xfce packages. i think all the big distributions provide xfce packages.

I know, but my main thing against installing 10.10 is the age.It may only be 1 year old, but it is likely to have a lot of updates. I am going to have a look into openSuSE with either Xfce or LXDE.

what kind of netbook do you use? maybe someone has experienced the same problem.

Asus Eee PC 901, Linux Edition (So 4+16GB SSD, not 4GB+8GB)with 2GB RAM.

did it come with ubuntu 10.10 preinstalled? maybe they installed some driver to make the touchpad working.

Nope, it came with Xandros. But quite a few have worked.

I always found that the Debian XFCE Desktop was faster and used less resources than Xubuntu and most others using XFCE
You can get a Debian Live XFCE to test it out, though of course it will run faster, etc once installed vs Live
http://live.debian.net/

http://live.debian.net/cdimage/release/5.0.9/i386/

they have USB images too

OH
found this stuff also
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Asus_Eee_PC_901

http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Asus_Eee_PC_901

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=45546

I suspect ARCH would be just as fast as Debian

EDIT
You can boot the Debian Live off the lappy's HDD just like from USB and it wont interfere with Xubuntu or others

Ah, thanks. When I tried installing Debian 6 earlier this year, it complained that it did not have rt2680.bin. Where can I get this file?

oh you already tried Squeeze?

firmware-ralink

http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/firmware-ralink

You'll have to add 'non-free' to the repos to get it.

Perfect, thanks.

I tried it when I was testing to see what worked with the touchpad, but never installed it.

Xfce 4.6 is available in Debian stable and Slackware. It's very solid and dependable in both. If you want 4.8 you'll need to run Debian Testing or Slackware -current (For Slack, last time I checked 4.8 packages are not yet in -current but I believe they are available from rworkman's repository?).

Salix OS comes with Xfce by default and is based on Slackware but made easy.

http://www.salixos.org

I wouldn't use SUSE with Xfce: various facilities tend to be missing with any desktop but KDE. The best Xfce distros are Mint, SalineOS, Salix, Vector Standard, ZevenOS.