Eee PC, distro choice, power mgmt

[Ben Scott]

Hi all,

  So, I was in BestBuy the other day, and saw and bought an Asus Eee
PC 900A for $200 (1 GB RAM, 4 GB SSD "hard disk", 1600 MHz CPU,
100BASE-T, 802.11g, MMC/SD, 3xUSB).  It ships with a Xandros Linux
configuration which finds new and interesting ways to suck.  So, I
plan on repartitioning the entire SSD and installing a better distro.
(This was my intent all along anyway.)  I'm unsure on distro choice
and wanted to poll for opinions here.

  What I'd like to find is something lightweight and capable of
supporting a traditional Unix environment.  I want X11, FVWM, and
xterm as my main UI.  I want to avoid the collection of
always-running, memory-hungry daemons which most modern Linux distros
seem to assume these days.  I might tolerate them on a desktop PC that
has resources to spare, but this little laptop is somewhat resource
constrained.  I believe this rules out Fedora and Ubuntu.

  I also want the hardware to work.  Fortunately, it seems like there
are quite a few projects which will give me the needed drivers and
modules for any number of distros.  So good.  I'm eying "DebianEeePC",
which is basically Debian "testing" with hardware-specific packages
pre-loaded.  I'm thinking Debian is a good choice for this because
Debian has a small base footprint, allows heavy customization, but
still comes with lots of packages of modern toys.

  But what about power management?  In particular, I'd like to set up
this guy with suspend-to-RAM and suspend-to-disk, so that I can have a
mobile environment that wakes up quickly where I left off last.  I
have absolutely no clue about how this stuff works with modern Linux.
Am I setting myself up for trouble by going the minimalist route?  Is
the suspend stuff all really complicated, and thus warrants bloated
desktops and a plague of daemons to make it work?

  On a related note: For suspend-to-disk, is it required that I have a
swap partition equal to main RAM?

-- Ben