I bought an Aspire One recently to replace my eeePC 701 which was too slow for me

. I opted for the harddrive (120G) model. A friend of mine who also had an eeePC got the 8G SSD model almost the same day.
Generally FreeBSD runs satisfactorily on this model. Some general notes follow:
1. You have to install 7.1-BETA2 or recent 7.1-PRERELEASE for the ethernet card to work. It will not work in 7.0-RELEASE. I did a 'make release' on my workstation and created a 7.1-PRERELEASE CDROM, but you don't have to do this, BETA2 should be sufficient
2. The hard disk model has a lot of space, you can use the standard partitioning schemes and even activate journaling if you wish (I did). For the 8GB SSD model, you may wish to create a large '/' partition rather than split the space between /var /usr /tmp and so on.
3. I got the 1Gb RAM model (which I upgraded to 1.5Gb). With this size of memory and considering the kind of applications you will run on it, you may opt to not create a swap at all. This especially true for the SSD model, where swap supposedly can limit the life span of the SSD device.
4. FreeBSD will happily install and run on an external USB disk (either hard disk or flash drive) if you wish. We installed FreeBSD on my friend's One, in an external 160GB 2.5inch disk. Runs flawlessly.
5. For the wireless network to work you will need to follow Weinter's instructions
but you will also have to recompile the kernel after copying the files. So the complete set of instructions would be:
Code:
# cd madwifi-ng-r2756+ar5007/hal
# cp -R * /usr/src/sys/contrib/dev/ath/
# cd /usr/src
# make buildkernel installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
(You don't really need to type KERNCONF=GENERIC, but if you created your own kernel configuration file, substitute GENERIC with your filename. Your kernel configuration file should be placed in /usr/src/sys/i386/conf. If in doubt of the procedure, please read the
relevant section in the FreeBSD Handbook)
Bear in mind compiling a more or less default kernel in the One takes about 50 minutes (in the hard disk model, and I would expect it to take more in the SSD model). You may however compile the kernel on another machine and copy the resulting files to the One by means of a USB disk or similar. In this case I would suggest to create a temporary directory to install the kernel and then tar the files and uncompress them to the One:
Code:
# mkdir /path/to/kerneltemp
# cd /usr/src
# env DESTDIR=/path/to/kerneltemp make buildkernel installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
6. I have not tried anything with the camera yet (I am not really interested in it) and I believe the card readers will not work in 7.1
Hope this helps. If you need more specific help feel free to send me an email. I try to keep track of the forum, but admittedly I am much better at following mailing lists
