In February of 2009 I purchased an Acer Aspire One. It quickly has taken on the role of communications with the outside world.

Out of the box the model I purchased was running Linpus Linux, which I quickly replaced with Debian/Lenny, which I quickly upgraded to Debian/Sid.

I removed the 512mb SO-DIMM and replaced it with a 1gb stick. I soldered a USB connector to the board so I could stash a bluetooth adapter inside the case. With those two upgrades taken care of the next thing to do was to make using it feel snappier. The 8gb solid state drive is a little slow compared to standard drives so applications that are disk i/o bound tend to feel sluggish, especially FireFox3. The solution was to create a TMPFS mountpoint to hold the Firefox profile, Thunderbird profile, and Liferea profile, outlined here.