Hi.

I'm looking for a simple distro for a new Netbook that my dad bought. I'm looking for something that doesn't have a start menu, but rather something more like the iPhone, with a limited number of big icons that are easy to get to fast.

My dad will be using this for nothing more than accessing the web, and jotting down notes, but the kids might use this for watching videos. He's also into bookmarking all his favourite websites, so maybe there should be a 'favorites' tab with all his bookmarked pages, and a tab with common applications, like Mozilla, Notepad, and media player.

I looked at Ubuntu's netbook remix and it's sort of what I am looking for, but I have in mind something smaller and even more limiting, like Acer's Lunpus Lite.

Any ideas?

EEEbuntu is what I gave my wife. The only real thing I had to do for her was setup Japanese input--aside from that, I showed her the web browser and Office, and of course, network, and she commented that it was pretty much like using the Mac. Oh, I gave her that Mac like dock, I've forgotten which--I think it was available through their repos though.

I very much dislike Linpus Lite, when I tried it, which was, admittedly, shortly after it came out, it was buggy as all heck, tied networking into the GUI--well, most of the "Desktop Distros" what I call UbunDora, do that--had one user only, who had all rights with no password, and all in all, it was quite limiting, both, I think for the Windows user trying something different and the experienced Linux user.

So, like you, I looked around and tried a few before settling for EEEbuntu for her--it seemed to be the best thing for an inexperienced user.
I think they have a live version that you can try.

He may,quickly, become bored/frustrated with a minimalistic distro.

Recent netbooks have plenty of power and ram to run full-blown distros well. I'm finding Mint Linux(gnome edition) well suited to my AA1 with most of the apps I need. Cheese works awesome for the webcam.

I looked at moblin a while back. Its pretty nifty but it needs to be developed just a little more so it can be accepted by the end-users.

You can give it a try, it has a nice big-iconed interface and everything is accessible with a few clicks.

I have Jolicloud installed on my Eee Pc 701. Its's easy to install even for a numpty like me who has no experience of installing Linux from a usb key. And it looks fantastic. It's only in the beta stage but it looks the real deal. You can get by invitation only.

Here's the website http://www.jolicloud.com