That's it! User-agent spoofing is what I was looking for. As I was looking around about this I see that Firefox has an extension that you can turn this on and off with easily and change it to many types. I may try going to Peppermint One instead of Ice since it comes with FF and i can easily experiment (I would love to find a way to emulate the blackberry column view).

I did get Opera loaded and it works nicely on the small screen with the fit to width option (the fit to width extension in chrome just seemed to slow things down on me). I tried to follow the instructions in the link but got lost but managed to fumble my way through it using the software manager (?) and then letting it do its own thing and update.

One last question, after installing a new program is it recommended to reboot or something (apt-get?).

Thanks to all!!

No need to reboot when installing programs. In fact, there are very few instances where you need to reboot Linux after installing anything. Kernel upgrades and video card drivers are a couple situations where it is necessary, it will let you know when it needs to be rebooted.

Just a cautionary note that user agents are considered in at least some web dev circles to be "a complete mess, and near useless" (honestly, read that, it's hilarious too).

Increasingly designers use javascript (jquery framework in particular) to actually sniff features on your browser without recourse to the user agent string, and in fact myself and at least some others are subscribing to the theory that actually, given that the designer marks up his design properly, it should be entirely down to the engineers of a given browser to get it to display correctly -- i.e. engineers building a web browser for small screens should jolly well make sure that valid sites display properly on a small screen.

I'm trying to cut a fairly complex UI issue into very cut and dry categories -- things are still in a real state of flux but I'd suggest that over time the ua string, while it will work on a number of (particularly more mainstream sites) quite well, will eventually become deprecated, so it's not a forever solution.

Ideally there'd be a browser specifically for small screen netbooks that renders pages correctly, of course -- I realise it's frustrating if there isn't.