So my diminutive Acer Aspire One is now running Ubuntu Netbook Edition and seems to like it, although the initial two tries at installing it failed utterly. The second failure was the worst as the system seems to have gotten stuck in a swap storm. It had been installed but was running very slowly, and then had to rush off elsewhere — on returning a couple of hours later it was writing to the SSD like mad and completely unresponsive. Only a magic SysRq key could give me my system back so I rebooted and only then remembered I had left it doing a software update — oops, no kernel! How can an installer only a few days old be so out of date?

I had reused some existing partitions in the installer, but not their contents, so I have no idea what the difference was between the final successful install and the disaster immediately before it. Indeed, I expected the final install to be as bad as the others — I can’t remember what I hoped to achieve. Surprisingly the third time worked like a charm. Very odd. Moblin was running out of steam and they didn’t have numpy packaged so I jumped ship … the day before Meego came out! Talk about timing! Still I don’t expect Meego 1.0 is very stable, nor does it possess the pygtk and numpy libraries I want.