I have an inexpensive samsung netbook in india (technical details described here http://www.samsung.com/in/consumer/pc-p ... cification -- basically atom N455 166 ghz, 250 gm hard drive 1 Gb ram)

What edition of linux should I install on it?

Based on what I have seen in the forums it seems that I should stick to say 10.04.2 (Lucid Lynx), and avoid 10.10 (Maverick Meekrat) since the fn keys for brightness seem to be having problems there. Should I take the netbook edition? How about Kubuntu vs. Ubuntu? Or should I consider an even older version of ubuntu? Any advice from experienced people appreciated.

10.10 have problem of hang up after sleep mode, no other problems really exists. It is problem within regression in 2.6.35 kernel and has workaround.
Ubuntu or Kubuntu is a point of personal preferences.

Netbook Edition brings only Unity UI instead of Gnome.

ok so i installed 10.04 netbook edition, which also has gnome as an option when logging in .

In case anyone is interested:
wireless card worked with a driver that I had to download, but was automatically suggested by ubuntu in hardware drivers.

I cannot figure out how to get the backlight controls to work using fn+p and down arrow keys; installing samsung-backlight didn't seem to work.
I also find the touchpad is recognized as a mouse, which means i cannot use touchfreeze or something similar to disable touchpad while typing, although the vertical scroll works well.

not yet tried vga