Have you tried the i3 window manager on your portable yet?

I installed i3 last night. It is very nice for running a lightweight desktop and possibly conserving battery power. Personally I like it better than LXDE, Xfce and other light window managers.

The only reason I won't use it is because I cannot adjust my backlight brightness in i3. My function keys for brightness work great in Ubuntu's Unity. If only I could figure out what commands the brightness keys are executing in order to use the same commands in i3. Then I would be all set!

 

Re the backlight, try adding gnome-settings-daemon to your session.

I've tried I3 briefly myself. Don't like it much, configuration and default keybindings are a bit painful IIRC... Ratpoison is more my speed.

 

For some reason it didn't work. Maybe it would work under Ratpoison. Haven't tried yet.

 

Try setting the backlight using xbacklight.