For those considering purchasing an Acer Aspire
While I found the tutorial clear and interesting, my advice for those considering buying an Aspire with half a gig and SDD drive would be: if you are doing it just to try it thinking that you can always add those things later, spend the extra cash and go for the version with HDD and 1GB of RAM. If you can afford the small price difference, of course. You'll save yourself a lot of headaches.
The main problem with that one is that it only comes with XP. But Ubuntu 8.10 runs nicely provided you do a small tweak in the sound config file and compile the latest madwifi snapshot. Once that is done you'll not need the 1.5GB upgrade and will not be performing any contortions to fit a disk drive. Mainly because it runs wonderfully at those specs, no swap needed for web browsing and mail.
Typing this from my wonderful Aspire One 120GB HDD 1GB RAM running Ubuntu 8.10
Biting the hand that feeds IT
