I am not sure what type of netbook you have but Ubuntu has a good list of netbook compatibility on their site:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks

Hopefully that list will let you know what does/does not work with your model. Good luck and welcome to Linux.

You could easily just monitor a PID file for the service if that service creates one. If the PID file is not as expected, send a message to the admin and try to restart the service. Executing ps with a search using grep to find a running process would also work. As was mentioned earlier, monitoring the messages log would probably be the least effective way of doing this. Just about any modern monitoring software (like Nagios mentioned earlier) will do this for you with little effort needed.