Well here it goes.. Aside from googling probably 10+ hours, and trying to install a few variations of Linux, I have absolutely no idea where to go from this. It's being installed on my HP Mini 110. Here are its specs: CPU- Intel Atom N270 @ 1.60GHz 60 °C RAM- 2.00GB Single-Channel DDR2 @ 266MHz Motherboard- HP 308F Graphics- LP101WH1-TLB2 (1366x768@60Hz) (whatever that means) Intel Mobile Intel 945 Express Chipset Family Storage- OCZ Vertex of some sort, its a 64GB Just a side note, I used to have Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit on it, and it was about the worst experience ever, it didn't really do anything. About the most productivity out of having Win7 on it was staring at the pretty M$ logo... -.- So far I've looked into these: Puppy Linux, AntiX, Bodhi, SparkyLinux, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, Linux Lite, Lubuntu, Chromium (no idea how to install that), Point Linux, Android 4.x, Crunchbang, Manjaro, MacPup, Linux Mint, and finally SolusOS. I've also tried XBMC, and GeeXboX, and OpenELEC to no avail. What's most important are: 1) support for SSD, so it doesnt die prematurely 2) lightweight on the resources, but capable of playing 1080p movies on ssd, and some light browsing to stay communicated. 3) something that isnt a back to the future replica. lots of these, i.e. crunchbang, manjaro, puppy linux, etc. looked very windows 2000-ish. My goal was to go for a more 'retro' feel. something kind of flashy, but not overkill like Win7. 4) Fast boot up. Tried Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu with no success. All three were quite sluggish feeling, and none could play 1080p videos. The newest Ubuntu just froze after typing in the login stuff. 5) This is optional, but slightly prefered. Support for the OS isnt huge as all I'm looking to do is be able to play movies off the hdd while traveling. Use of a browser isnt really that big of a deal, seeing as with OpenELEC it offers netflix streaming. If anyone has suggestions what I could try out, or if anyone knows how to get the proper install of OpenElec to work, I'd be very very thankful.
Looks like your HP Mini 110 is starting to get old. Are you sure its DDR2? I looked it up and found that it may have DDR3 Memory: Cnet I looked up the LP101WH1-TLB2 and it is referring to your screen, not the video chip. The video chip is pretty important since you want to watch movies. You might have the Intel GMA 3600, which isn't new, but isn't horrible either. Its much better than my Chromebook Intel HD 2000 video chip. How do you plan to watch movies if you only have 64 GB of hard drive space? You will only be able to fit a small number of video's on that drive... I'm not too familiar with other distro's... I've used Linux Mint the most, but have used Fedora and Ubuntu a bit. Mint is based on Ubuntu but even more stable. Ubuntu is always very updated, but never as "cutting-edge" as Arch Linux. Fedora is based on Red Hat and does not include any proprietary software/drivers/etc. One thing I would recommend if you have time to play around is using Openbox Windows Manager. Basically it can run with Ubuntu, Mint, Debian or any other distro you want to try. Just install it and login to Openbox. It is so lightweight that you can program which menu's and windows you want to use. Initially it is a "blank-slate" with no windows or menu's or panels at all. So it will require some trial-n-error and some research to get it the way you want it. But I like how "bare bones" it is when I'm running games. Anyways, there are some other Linux guru's here than can recommend better options for you.
A small tip. I use OCZ drives. Google OCZ SSD drive untiles. Their utilites are great! sets trim at the push of a button":O}.
Since it seems to be a quite dated laptop you have there, I don't think you expect good performance no matter what setup you go for. Definitely go for a lightweight desktop environment, like Xfce or Lxde. Linux Mint has an Xfce version. As for the actual look, that can be changed no matter what desktop environment you use. Just about all desktop environments lets you customize as much as you want, and a lot of people create themes that you can use. Just google for themes for your particular desktop environment and chances are you will find something you like. To summarize some of your points: 1) When it comes to SSD, ALL Linux distros support SSD as this is part of the kernel. And as long as you don't use some ancient distribution then you will have a fairly recent kernel where support is very good. 2) Xfce or Lxde are very lightweight desktop environemnts. Mint got a Xfce edition, ubuntu too with Xubuntu. Ubuntu also got a Lubuntu edition with Lxde. Lxde use Openbox as window manager, so if Lxde is still too sluggish, then I would not expect any difference between running Lxde and just plain Openbox. 3) The default look can be changed, so don't get too hung up on this. 4) You are highly unlikely to experience fast boot on that hardware. It is just too dated. You can get faster startup times, but it would require you to get into the guts of your distro to minimize startup services.
Arch can be a light distro, i didn't even fully install gnome, just the parts i need. u kind of need a personal arch guru if you use anything but 100% vanilla arch, the biggest weakness of Arch is the intolerance of newbies on the forums/wiki.
