This week I bought a new netbook (an Acer Aspire One Pro P531). I was determined to reward someone who sells a Linux netbook but in spite of my best efforts noone was selling the sort of configuration I wanted (big SSD drive, 2GB memory) without Windows XP. So I bought one and installed Fedora on it myself.
It's a fantasticlittle device and everything on it just works with Fedora. Apart from the ethernet card which seems not to want to dhcp (although that might be some incompatibility with my home hub/router/adsl thingy).
I'm using it with Xmonad to do random bits of Haskelltinkering when I take the tube to work in the morning. The keyboard is a bit fiddly, but manageable, and the small form factor and light weight are terrific. In this respect it reminds me a little of my old sony vaio which was a sort of expensive predecessor to a netbook that I got second hand.
One thing I would have done differently if I had done more research is to get the other sort of Atom processor. Ones with an "N" or a "Z" at the front are based on the i686 architecture, whereas ones without that are x86_64 based. Since I have an x86_64 desktop pc at home it would have been slightly more convenient not to have to download two seperate fedora versions. The upside of this one is I think it has slightly better battery life. In fact, battery life seems amazing.
permalink Updated: 2009-10-17