Looking for a light but still user friendly distro? Give Crunchbang a try. A quote from the website
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CrunchBang Linux is an Ubuntu based distribution featuring the lightweight Openbox window manager and GTK+ applications. The distribution has been built and customised from a minimal Ubuntu install. The distribution has been designed to offer a good balance of speed and functionality.
There are currenly three versions. A standard desktop edition, a lite edition (still in a release candidate stage) and Crunchee (a version specialized for the asus eee pc).
I’m running the lite edition on my acer 5310 and everything works fine. The installation was really simple, load the live cd and select install to harddisk from the menu. After installation I found no hardware issues, wifi and sound working out of the box.
Being new to Openbox I find it a pretty good window manager. It has no bells and whistles, just pure functionality and it feels fast and snappy. Only a few configuration files in XML format.
I did some lite tuning to Crunchbang, replaced NetworkManager with wicd and removed GDM. Wicd has no gnome dependencies which allowed me to slim the install even further down. GDM was removed as I prefer to logon to the prompt.