My first day with the Acer Aspire One
I finally decided what UMPC I really wanted, and the choice was the Acer Aspire One (aa1). One of the local telephone dealerships got some of the A110 Blue models in this week, and after a couple of trips there I finally whipped out the old VISA card.
First I had to test the Linpus operating system, which was OK for ordinary surf-mail-chat use, but I found it to be a bit limiting. Not least because it’s based on Fedora 8, and I really do prefer something Debianish for desktop use. So when I got home the first thing I did was to research how to install Ubuntu on it.
There is as always great tips to be found at the Ubuntu help site, and I followed that howto in almost all respects. The only thing I did different was to download the Ubuntu 8.04.1 desktop Live CD onto the running Linpus system, install UNetbootin and then push the iso onto a 1GB USB stick.
After a terribly long install I edited the fstab to mount the / file system as ext2 with the noatime option. A friend also sent me in the direction of this Geek Sheet, where I followed Tweak 2. This allowed me to get 9.1MB/s write speeds, where I would get only 7.1MB/s write speeds without the noop elevator. 9.1MB/s is not all that, but it was a noticeable speed gain 
Another tweak was to disable Firefox’s cache. IO is a real bottleneck on the aa1, so disabling writing to disk is always a good thing.
After playing with Ubuntu on it for a while it became apparentthat the original 512 MB RAM was way too little. So I set out to add another 1GB of RAM to it. Following this video on Youtube I managed to accomplish this successfully. However, RAM upgrades is not for everyone, you have to pick the entire computer apart.
So, after a few tweaks I finally got a UMPC that I think will serve me well as a companion notebook for the small trips and uses where my MBP is a real overkill and major weight addition.
Only thing I am still not happy with is that the fans are always running. Guess I have to play around with powertop and hunt for more information around the interwebs.
Interesting stuff indeed! – I’m still waiting for my pre-ordered ‘Pocket Rocket’ …
High Hopes for it, and I hope to get it running with Minty Freshness, so your experiences are invaluable! – Thanks
p.s. I’m even hoping to get it to run UFRaw in due course, which won’t be a ’step too far’ I trust …
Dum de dum …
Hi,
I’ve been running ubuntu for the last three years with 512 Mb RAM, without a problem if your asking me (exept maybe very large webpages). You state that 512 is way (!) too little. Why do you feel it’s not enough? I am thinking of buying one One myself and i thought 512 would fit just fine here…
Rolf Deenen
I am running without swap, as disk IO is a limiting factor on this machine. I also use tmpfs in RAM for /var/log and /tmp and such.
So 512 MB suddenly got a bit small.