I have one. Mine came with XP, and I blew that away to install Debian/Ubuntu. Ubuntu 8.10 works beautifully with a couple of tweaks most of which are linked above.
The Linipus version is based on Fedora and apparently users have been having much more luck with that then Debian based distros, but I haven't gotten around to messing with it.
Here's a short rundown of I had to do to get Ubuntu working properly:
- Compile from source or otherwise get ahold of a newer copy of the MadWifi ath5k driver to support the Aspire One's wireless.
- Update ALSA to a version that fully supports the Intel Audio chipset. Ubuntu 8.10 comes with it preinstalled, 8.04 doesn't.
- Add "pciehp pciehp_force=1" to your /etc/modules to get the card readers working (though they won't read MemoryStick or XD in Linux, just SD/MMC).
- Write a stupid little shell script to unload the wireless module (ath_pci) on suspend and reload it on resume to prevent the machine's wireless from occasionally going retarded when suspending/hibernating.
- Load acpi_cpufreq to enable CPU speed scaling, saves a portion of battery life.
That's really it. If you're the proud owner of an SSD based Aspire One model there are some other tweaks to increase its drive performance, but I didn't have to mess with them because I have the 160 gig model, neener neener neener, etc.
If you want to recompile your kernel for any reason I also found a
patch that you may as well apply. It supposedly handles properly the braindead way the Aspire One handles its card reader, specifically the hotplugging thereof.