Im flying to Europe soon and I am looking to take my laptop with me mainly to watch movies. I was wondering if perhaps there was a linux specifically designed to extend battery life concentrating only on light media use.

not a distro but the kernel allows you to run at a slower speed to save battery life. check out cpufreq My last iBook could be run at 600Mhz or 1200Mhz you can manually set it to run at the slowest speed to prolong your battery life.

That should do the trick on any modern distro.

If you have an intel processor you can try : http://www.lesswatts.org/projects/powertop/. It will give you hints about what can you do to increase battery life.

Also, it depends on your distribution. Here is a nice guide for gentoo: http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/power-management-guide.xml. You can read the tips even if you have other distro....

I realize that I could slow down my cpu but I was looking for a more serious approach to extending battery life. Like an OS that would have the fewest possible programs running in the background. Something that would buffer as much as possible to RAM. Also shut down all peripherals that are not in use. Finally an OS that would dim the screen as much as possible.

Ohh I was wondering now that duel core cpus are pretty common and it's easy to switch a core off. Is it more efficient to run both cores or switch one off if I want to extend battery life.