I consider buying a netbook, one of those small thingies that run with an Atom Intel CPU and a SSD harddisk.
The latter is pretty important to me, because otherwise I could buy just a little notebook and give that a go.

I have not yet decided what kind of netbook I will choose and buy, there are plenty to choose out there. As a help I wanted to find out how much space Xubuntu and Ubuntu are going to use on the harddisk.

I am using virtualbox 1.6.4 and a fixed-sized harddisk of 8 GB to evaluate this. Before each df -h I clean the cache of all deb packages, hopeing that this will help to make the numbers a bit more trustworthy.  Furthermore I am using the 8.04.1 Xubuntu alternate ISO.

Of course these numbers are not totally accurate and I am sure there is a lot of tweaking possible. However, tweaking is what I want to do, not need to do because I run out of diskspace….

Diskspace needed after a clean install of Xubuntu 8.04.1: 1.6 GB
Diskspace needed after a clean install of Xubuntu 8.04.1 and updates: still 1.6 GB
Diskspace needed after installing some more software: 1.8 GB
Diskspace needed after installing some media stuff: about 2.0 GB
Diskspace needed after installing kopete and gftp: about 2.05 GB
Diskspace needed after installing ubuntu-desktop: about 3.1 GB
Diskspace needed after installing kubuntu-desktop: about 4.2 GB

Media stuff installed included some players (such as xine, mpeg123, vlc, etc.) and codecs (win32codecs, etc.), mainly also the restricted-stuff…
The additionally installed software included thunderbird, nmap, wireshark, mysql5.0, apache2, kernel-headers, virtualbox and some more.

Conclusion:
I can very well work with xfce and additional 400 to 500 MB worth of software. So after using about 2.1 GB I would still have about 10 GB (most of the netbooks come with a 12 GB SSB now) left for films, data and so on.