Yesterday I finally took the plunge and installed the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR) on my Aspire One. I had been thinking about changing from the default Linpus distro for a while. Linpus works fine but being based on Fedora 8 it is not exactly cutting-edge!
One users on the net gave varying reports of the performance of UNR on the One, some had few problems while others appeared to have to do a lot of work just to get basic functionality. I brought my One to use, not to spend lots of time tinkering and so held back on changing for a while. Yesterday I brought a copy of the UK Linux magazine “Linux Format” and they had an article about UNR on the Aspire One. If a mainstream magazine was using UNR on the One with no problems then it time me to go for it!
I downloaded the latest Jaunty UNR image and copied it to a USB stick. Booting into live mode allowed me to play with the new distro and confirm that it worked OK before overwriting Linpus with a full UNR install. For the install I kept the partition structure that Linpus had used (ext2, 7Gig for / and 1Gig for swap) on the internal SSD and put /home on my 16Gig SD card, again using ext2. Shortly afterwards I had my new distro up and running.
UNR looks great and works well so far. Wireless worked out of the box. The only problems I have seen is that the wireless status LEDs do not work and the right hand memory card slot does not appear to be able to hot swap cards (I read that it works OK if a card is in the slot at boot time but have not checked this).
I am typing this post on the One and I am happy that I now have Ubuntu on my netbook.