I purchased the Aspire One at Costco for $300 with the hope that Ubuntu would install smoothly without glitches. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't a straight forward experience. The first problem is that the monitor aspect ratio was wrong. All text was squashed in the vertical plane. Luckily, the first 11.04 update fixed these problems. It also prompted me to install two proprietary drivers, which I did. Before the drivers were installed I couldn't load Unity. After they were installed I could load Unity.

At first this all seemed fine apart from a weird AMD watermark in the bottom right hand corner of the screen. I did the googles and found the following, which fixed the issue,

<http://askubuntu.com/questions/25519/how-to-remove-amd-unsupported-hardware-without-reinstalling-the-driver>

Totally gross, but it works.

This all seemed totally fine, but after awhile the computer just started to freeze and needed to be rebooted. This turned out to be harder to fix in terms of finding answers. I believe that it is somehow connected to the wireless as it always seems to happen when the wireless is starting up, but who knows. Anyway I found this helpful post.

<http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=10571078&postcount=16>

This worked (thank god). I had to boot into safe mode in order to have enough time to edit the necessary file. After this things all seem to be fine other than Unity not working. I'm not too bothered about that because I'm perfectly happy with classic mode. In fact classic seems a bit snappier. I'm not really sure about Unity anyway (what does it really add?).

Overall, compared with my now defunct Dell mini, it's a lot faster. Firefox works properly, which it didn't on the mini. I'm a happy bunny once more for $300 and some head scratching.