On Sunday, I purchased an Acer Aspire One - a 120Gb Linux machine in 'Sapphire Blue'. Ever since some of my friends started using Asus Eee machines, I'd been thinking about buying a 'netbook' (don't like the word netbook though: my MacBook Pro is "optimized for Internet access" (the wireless card and RJ-45 sockets give it away). 
Setting the Acer up was a no-brainer: you open it up, turn it on, it asks you your name, location, time and date, a root password and then you are booted into the rather Fisher-Price Linpus Linux OS, a Fedora-based distro designed for titchy little laptops. But I knew from the start I would want to switch to a grown-up distro, so on Monday, I spent most of the day faffing around with Ubuntu. First, downloading Ubuntu, then spending about four hours trying to get it to network boot, and a bit more time spent trying to create a bootable USB instance. I wish I still had the USB CD-ROM drive I used to own, as that would have made installing Ubuntu a breeze. At one point, I actually had four computers running simultaneously on my desk: my Mac, the Acer, a borrowed Windows laptop running LiveCD Ubuntu and another Windows box just there for good measure. The Ubuntu installation for netbooks needs to become a lot simpler. Here's my imaginary installation procedure: you download a small application that runs on Windows or Mac OS X. It guides you through the whole process - you simply plug an Ethernet cable between the target machine and the source machine, and it does everything else for you. I'm fairly nerdy, but I can't for the life of me figure out setting up DHCP and TFTP servers and fiddling around with DNS settings. Life's too short.
Eventually, I got Ubuntu running on the machine. Then I had to go through something of a palavar getting all the gear supported: wireless card, webcam, the flashy little LED telling you that you have a wireless connection, and much more. Not everything is working yet: I got on the train yesterday and put a SD card in the right-hand slot and it didn't mount. Oh well. The source for all this knowledge was the Ubuntu Community Documentation wiki page, which is excellent.
I've now got the Ubuntu Netbook Remix running on the machine, and am extremely happy with it. I've set Firefox up in such a way that I get a lot of screen space, and can just press F11 to get more of it. There are still some problems I'm having: the wireless is pretty ropey - and sometimes it'll just freeze up and the only way to get it to work again is to actually shut the machine down and restart it (not just restart it, but actually 'cold boot' it from power off). As something of an uptime whore, this is not ideal. I just haven't had the time to figure out what the sequence of magic is to make it all work. That said, when the wireless works, it works great. The range is pretty good. I haven't yet tested it from the garden, but the range seems as good as all the other wifi kit I've tried.
How is Ubuntu, then? It's really a superb OS. The transition from Mac OS X to Ubuntu was pretty seamless. Ubuntu doesn't have some of the polish of OS X, but it more than makes up for it by not having some of OS X's particular annoyances. That said, the main things I'm missing from OS X are actually the "pbcopy" and "pbpaste" commands, and maybe also the "security" command. I'm sure there are equivalents in Linux, but I haven't found them yet. One difference between Ubuntu and Linpus is that Linpus gives you visual feedback for the Fn commands to make the screen brighter and darker - it's fairly self-evident, but it's nice to get a little graph telling you what setting you are on.
What else am I missing, then? TextMate is a big one, and here is where things get a bit more interesting. I decided that having a Linux box as one of my primary machines is a damn good reason to learn Vim. I know, emacs zealots, I know. I love Lisp and if I were religious, I'd pray to St. IGNUcius, but Vim is awesome. It's nice from the perspective of someone who has been touch-typing since about the age of ten. Emacs is, of course, a natural progression for those who use TextMate. Every time I've tried to use Emacs, I ended up getting bloody frustrated in no short order - but Vim works like a dream. It does take some time to get it how you want it though - I've probably spent the best part of five hours this week customising my ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim/filetypes.vim files, and reading pages from the Vim wiki.
I should probably pop all my Vim settings file into a folder of their own, version control it and run a build-script to install it. I have a feeling it'll be something I'll end up syncing between computers and carrying around with me as a sort of totem of battles lost and won.
This brings me to the primary uses of my new machine: it's quite simple. I'm fed up with carrying around a heavy, battery-hungry and oversized MacBook Pro. I have this ridiculously huge backback which I carry around with me, and the bulk of it is my laptop. The AspireOne fits inside a shoulder bag. In fact, next time I buy a coat, I'm buying one with a pocket big enough for the machine - my current coat pocket is about 1" too small for the machine. It's really almost a PDA replacement. My primary use for the machine is simple: programming, writing documents and browsing the Web. The first two of which are heavily keyboard-based, and for which I really admire the keyboard. It's not quite as nice as they keyboards I use on my Mac, but it's probably the best non-Mac laptop keyboard I've used. I have access to a Windows laptop and the keyboard is freaking awful - all they keys are subtly in the wrong place, and despite being full-sized, I fat-finger the thing all the time. On the AspireOne, no such problem. I can type at full speed - 80-90 WPM - on a machine literally half the size of my MacBook Pro.
The trackpad is okay. It's a little over sensitive, and not quite as nice as the one on my Mac. The 'demarcated' scroll takes a bit of getting used to, as does having the left and right buttons at either end of the trackpad. All of this is made a non-issue by Fn+F7 which, in both Linpus and Ubuntu, turns the damn thing off. So, when you are working away on the shell or in Vim/Emacs etc., you can turn the trackpad off and not have it randomly press buttons while you work. Now, sometimes this command doesn't seem to turn the trackpad back on again. I've found a hacky solution which is to focus on a different application - just Alt-Tab over to Firefox or the ume-launcher, or even just hit the power button to bring up the logout window, then hit Fn+F7 again, and then Alt-Tab back to the application you need. Again, it works, but it's a little bit hacky. On the aforementioned crappy Windows laptop, it'd be great if I could emulate this functionality. Tips greatly appreciated.
What other problems have I had? The speakers are crap. They are good enough for a system bell and the like, but, wheras on larger laptops, often the speakers are good enough to listen to the radio or some music on, the AspireOne speakers are bad to the point of it being irritating. This is a minor complaint: as a machine that I'm primarily intending for use on the train, this is not a major concern. Plus, it's a bit sad that they don't include the larger battery by default. When I find somewhere that sells the battery, I'll probably upgrade. Currently, I get just over two and a half hours out of the three-cell battery, and would really like the five to seven hours I've seen mentioned for the big one. It does look a bit unsightly, but, meh, it's a computer, not a fashion show.
I've had some software problems too: firstly, I couldn't get RSpec or Ruby Gems to work, and had to do a lot of faffing around to get them to work - moving files around, modifying permissions and changing the $PATH. Nothing to complicated, but not something I've had to do on OS X. I also can't for the life of me get libxml-ruby to install. Which, as I'm in the middle of building a library that is completely reliant on libxml-ruby is a bit of a problem. I tried installing it using apt-get, and got nothing. On the upside, git-gui/gitk actually looks good on Ubuntu - on OS X, it looks like a pile of arse, but on here, it is pretty damn good.
Overall, I'm very happy with the machine. The price is pretty damn good: £220 (plus another £55 for the six-cell battery) - which, well, is certainly more affordable than any Macintosh. When my MacBook Pro expires, I will probably either replace it with an iMac or a Mac Mini, and use my AspireOne as my primary notebook machine. I wouldn't want to use Windows on this machine. In fact, I don't really want to use Windows ever, but, well, sometimes needs must. I'm certainly looking forward to writing the little Python, Ruby and bash scripts which glue everything together and make the world go around - I've got a folder full of them on OS X, and it'll be fun to see what things I can do on Ubuntu. I've already got one thing I'm planning.
