Hello,
i'm sort of a newbie of the Linux world. I bought some years ago a 1015cx Eee PC certified with Ubuntu 12.04 hoping that i would have a nice time with Linux distros. Little i knew that Asus and Intel were making fun of my inexperience with the infamous GMA 3600 Cedarview chip. Ubuntu was very heavy and slow on the poor netbook, Lubuntu very buggy, Lubuntu 13.04 less buggy but without the graphical acceleration, and at last Xubuntu 12.04 has been a nice compromise between graphics and speed. But now i am starting to feel a little scared because of the nearing end of support of LTS 12.04, which is set for next april.
So i came here to ask you: which is the next distro i could install on the netbook? I would like it to be not too much complicated, very fast or at least above average fast and i have to be able to install the cedarview drivers without breaking completely the OS.
I was looking at Arch and Manjaro, and because of their rolling style of release they stroke me as the possible solutions for my problem (except for the extremely complicated type of installation for Arch). But they don't seem to me two very lightweight distros. Am i wrong? Are there any more distros that i should consider?
Thank you for your time

The PowerVR GMA line is junk - but you already know that. If you are happy with Xubuntu, why not just upgrade that ?.
Personaly I found Bodhi excellent on an old gateway (GMA 500) I bought years ago. Extremely lightweight desktop that I used as the in-kernel driver was being developed. Note that it does use Enightenment as DE, so there is a learning curve - the doco for Bodhi is (was when I looked at it) very good. It's Ubuntu based, so plenty of software available in the repos.

Do not try to use proprietary drivers and/or old kernels. Just use the in-kernel driver which does 2D fine - 3D is a lost cause with that hardware.

Wonder if you could use vesa just as well. The rest of it is pokey.

Not sure if these are worth trying to add to a distro. https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Det...21938&lang=eng

I was shocked to see intel doing that but I guess it makes sense. The prior atoms failed in video design too.

First of all i always relied on a fresh install to squeeze the most out of that snail of netbook. Secondly (i'm not anyway near to be an expert) but, since i need 3.2 non-pae kernel and Xserver 1.11.x to make the cedarview-drm module work, wouldn't the upgrade break the cedarview module, because of the kernel and Xserver updates?
That's why i was looking at Manjaro because, if i understood correctly, i can install the OS, downgrade the kernel and Xserver, and install the cedarview module.
I need to use that module and not the default drivers past 12.04 because the default drivers have problems scaling the videos to the resolution of the monitor (1024x600), so if i have a 720p or a 1080p running the videos is cutted at the borders of the monitor. It's the only problem (in fact Lubuntu 13.04 was also snappier), but it's a big one.

Thanks for the help. The only problem with it is that there is no documentation, and is dated October 2012. If it was something good i think it would have been already implemented, or not?

I know there are tablets or hybrids (like Novero Solana) with the same processor and graphic card that came with Android
What I wonder is how will it achieved a working 3d acceleration.
Intel was performed a driver for Ubuntu 12.04 with 3D support for OpenGLES 2 (exactly that required by android)
But I do not know how they managed the porting of Linux x86 drivers to android ...
Anyone have any idea to do?

Why do you think you need a non-pae kernel? That's for old CPUs and should not be required by the graphics. A quick check shows a cedarview-drm driver in the Ubuntu multiverse repository.

The last time I checked it, the Manjaro Xfce was slightly larger than Xubuntu. You might like to try the Xfce version of PCLinuxOS, which was slightly lighter. That's a rolling release, but aimed at family computers, so it's not bleeding edge. Distrowatch was been looking at rolling-release distros, and found PCLinuxOS the easiest and most reliable. The Xfce version is an unofficial respin, but I found it reliable. You can get the download links here
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index...,128098.0.html
I can't vouch for how it will cope with cedarview, though.

I followed this steps to install the cedarview drivers, after i completed the Xubuntu installation:
And after all this steps i found myself with the 3.2.0-70-generic kernel, which is, if i'm not wrong, the non-pae one. So probably i need it to make the cedarview driver work, i have no other hypothesis for it.
Anyways, i will inform myself on PCLinuxOS, thanks.