Question about netbook screens

[Paul W. Frields]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 11:40:35PM +0100, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 18:00 -0400, Paul W. Frields wrote:
> > Hi Desktop SIG,
> > 
> > When I talked to someone with an EeePC today, he told me he wanted to
> > have Fedora 11 but had to install another OS, because Fedora would
> > sometimes draw windows whose action areas weren't on the screen, so he
> > couldn't make button selections.  I don't have a netbook, so I don't
> > know if or how this problem might be solved, and was hoping someone
> > could tell me.
> 
> Probably an EeePC 7" where running a "normal" desktop is completely
> absurd. I don't think that any other distros are making particular
> changes to make that easier.

Yeah, I don't know about standard desktop editions of common distros,
but he showed me the unit, running a netbook remix that made a
specific change that completely alters the desktop.  It hides the
normal desktop in favor of a menu driven system, and windows that are
opened are force-maximized (sorry if that's the wrong term).  I'm not
suggesting that's the right way to go, just wondering if there's
any potential solution so the standard Fedora runs more acceptably for
those users.

> Things like disabling the text in toolbars, or selecting smaller fonts
> would certainly help.

Strangely enough, one of the more interesting comments I got from
a couple people was that fonts were legible on their netbooks in
Fedora 11 (unlike other distros they had tried) because of larger
fonts!

> But, really, 800x480?! That's even smaller than the 800x600 that people
> try not to break.

Sure -- I'm not saying it's not a difficult problem.  If we had to
have some sort of special experience for netbooks, would it be
possible to customize that into something like a schema package that
reset a bunch of normal defaults?

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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