What linux and what GUI to put on the Sony VGN-P11ZR?

Question

linux

Conditions:
A girl with a glamorous Sony VGN-P11ZR subnote . He loves vkontaktegi, classmates and other plankton entertainment. Sometimes you need to work with documents and signs.
task:
because laptop is a desperate brake, then whist and even the “seven” work on it at a speed below acceptable. In addition, having killed the winlocker from it for the seventh time, I decided to stick a linux.
But during a cursory googling on the issue, I found that people who installed linux on it were faced with an insoluble problem of high-speed firewood for the GMA500. Watching videos is an important part of using a laptop.
Advise, please, linux with a distinct graphical shell, so that it is light enough for an atom and does not cause panic in a girl who is used to Windows.

Answer 1

Ubuntu or so.
There is firewood, google bourgeois.

Answer 2

I do not recommend installing KDE on Atom, plasma will gobble up the whole atom with giblets, there will be no resources left for third-party applications. Gnome is more tolerant, but in your case XFCE will be the best solution (is it the taskbar, tray, desktop and start menu adequate?). Compiz sculpt is also not worth it.
Xubuntu will be the most problem-free, if it slows down, then you can try CrunchBang with XFCE, it is also on Debian, but more sharpened for speed. If even CrunchBang is slow, compile Gentoo with OpenBox for your architecture.

Answer 3

For starters, try kubuntu. The system is distinguished by the support of a decent amount of iron, and KDE is similar in appearance to Windows, if you screw the compiz, the effects will be cooler than in the seven.

Answer 4

Debian + gnome - the most adequate option in terms of performance / functionality / appearance

Answer 5

Install Ubuntu 10.04. Compiz should run quite fast (unless they have “some other GMA500”, as is often the case with vysers and soneks).

Answer 6

I have an Asus T91MT, the same ill-fated GMA500 viduha (the list of curses is attached here). I have Kubuntu 11.04 (I had to downgrade the kernel and X a bit) and Ubuntu 10.10 (no need to downgrade anything). I'm using the proprietary psb driver (poulsbo). In Ubuntu, everything works smartly with compiz, in sneakers I had to switch to XRender instead of OpenGL and everything also moves very quickly.
In any case, after installing out of the box, I had to finish a little in xorg.conf:

Section "DRI"
    Mode    0666
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier      "Configured Video Device"
    Option "UxaNoComposite" "true"
    Option  "AccelMethod" "UXA"
    Option "MigrationHeuristic" "greedy"
    Driver  "psb"
EndSection

Section "ServerFlags"
    Option  "DontZap"       "False"
EndSection

I also had to build mplayer with vaapi support, to be honest, it was not so easy for me, but now ppa seems to have working packages.
Also, I just recently tried emgd again (an open driver that intel writes from scratch), before it wasn’t going to work for me, this time I couldn’t raise 3D.
PS I have 1GB of RAM and I don’t feel discomfort in sneakers.