Today my wife scored me a little Acer Aspire One Netbook. It has a 160gig hdd, 1gig of ram and a little Intel Atom processor (1.6mhz). The screen is quite bright and at 8.5 inches its not much to look at, but seems to work well.

The little bugger came pre-installed with Winsux XPee and all it’s extras (Like Intervideo WinDVD (WHY? There is NO DVD drive), and the Acer eRecovery program (dunno, never used it). First things first, I slimmed down the Windows partition to 20gig, and saved the rest for Linux. and started installing Ubuntu; it wasn’t exactly simple, but it wasn’t more than I think a noobie could do. The only things that were non functional out of the box were the wifi, the card readers and when I hooked a second monitor up it tossed all the 3D drivers (reinstalled them with aptitude). The tutorial link I show a few sentances back took care of all that jazz, and it’s working 100% now.

Here are a few screen shots. These are taken after I had started theming my Ubuntu installation. I really like the AWN bar across the bottom (wish I could move it to the left side) and the Mac OS X look to my windows. Enjoy:

Acer Aspire One - Ibexed

And with Firefox open:

Full screen w/Firefox and Weather

And this shows VirtualBox stuffing Windows XP inside. I’ve been in that VirtualBox installation of Windows and it’s pretty usable. I’m installing all my Garmin stuff so I can use this little netbook to track all my running around n stuff. (I had to edit the image a little, I had some icons that might not be acceptable).

XP Installing in VirtualBox

And here is a screen-shot of XP running all installed and the like (with my AWN bar covering the bottom). I’ve got it maximized here, but it will also go entirely full screen as well as windowed.

Running Windows in VirtualBox

I also installed my Garmin ANT Agent so I can use my Garmin 405 with this little netbook. I’m planning on letting it do the down/uploading in the morning after my run. I dropped Firefox and ClamWin Anti Virus on this installation as well, it’s a pain to install Operating Systems in the AAO (Acer Aspire One) so this time I’m protecting it a little.

Enjoy,

Justin