Netbooks have little screen and often it's very difficult use applications with unresizeble windows. Internet navigation too can be a bit frustrating, the reason is the wide monitor with little height, with the Gnome Panel on bottom side monitor space for windows is reduced to a dimension nearly useless.

So the best thing to do is to take advantage from the screen width. Obviously you can move "gnome-panel" on left or right side, but making it difficult to use... and ugly. We must replace it with something efficient and cute.

Let's start:

1- There are many type of dock bar: Docky, AWN, DockBarX, Wbar etc.. The best compromise between usability, stability, looking and resource consumption is AWN, so we can install it writing from terminal:

sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator

Obviously we answer "Y" to install all dependencies needed. After this we must install some extra applets for awn dockbar, write in terminal:

sudo apt-get install awn-applets-c-extras

2- Now we must enable X Composite Manager, [first I reccomand to you to try writing in terminal "xcompmgr -C"(without quotes), if it's all right you can go further] to draw correctly dockbar and transparencies. It's very simple. Go in menu ---> Preferences ---> Startup Applications. We must add a new one startup application, click "add" and fille the field like this:

Name: xcompmgr

Command: xcompmgr -C

Save it.

3- Ok, we must remove gnome-panel and replace it with awn: write in terminal "gconf-editor". Navigate to: desktop ---> gnome ---> session ---> required_components. In the entry panel replace "gnome-panel" with "avant-window-navigator" (without quotes). Close all. Logout and re-login.

Now you have awn as dock bar, you can edit almost everything aspect, themes, applets, desklets, position, dimension etc...

I moved the awn dockbar on the left side of the screen, enabled intellihide and other stuff, now I can browse everything at full screen.

This is an example of how your desktop will be:

Hope this can be helpful.

Raistlin84.