CER’s Aspire One is a solid netbook, but it can be much more.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been using it as a full notebook, running office applications, editing digital photos, surfing the Web and watching videos on a robust, full-featured system. The remarkable thing is, I’m doing it on a such a small, lightweight computer (less than a kilo) that has only 8 gigabytes (GB) of storage and 1GB of memory.

The key to unlocking the Aspire One’s power was to replace the Linpus Lite Linux operating system that comes installed with the netbook with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron).

Linpus Lite, based on Fedora, is a good choice for first-time Linux users because it shields them from the complexity of the operating system. On the other hand, the simplified approach also makes it unwieldy to add programs that do not come installed, or to customize the system to work the way you want.

I chose Ubuntu as a replacement because it’s a great, user-friendly Linux distribution and I’ve always wanted to run it on a notebook.

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