I promised some tips and tricks to get the best out of the Acer Aspire One in my brief review.

I will keep this article updated as I discover more.

Getting to a terminal is easy, shift-F2 will provide you with a run box, running xterm from here will get you a terminal window, you can use sudo or your root password is the one you defined with the initial setup.

First thing is that some people are complaining about the performance of the SSD drive, let me start out by saying that the read performance is satisfactory at over 30MB/s. However the writes fall someway short of 10MB/s putting you in the 90's in terms of drive write performance. This is mitigated somewhat by the wise decision made by linpus of adding noatime to the mount options, so at least the mediocre write times don't impact reads.

However I found that adding elevator=noop to the kernel boot line to change the behavior of the IO scheduler from the default of the Completely Fair Queuing scheduler gave me another 2MB/s or so on writes with no other perceivable side effects. The default scheduler does some trickery that improves performance when dealing with a spinning platter, However this isn't relevant when dealing with solid state storage and actually gets in the way.I have done this frequently for Virtual machines running from a disk image in the past to good effect.

Just modify /boot/grub/grub.conf to add "elevator=noop" to the end of the kernel boot parameters already present. Then reboot.

 On the subject of the SSD drive, I was a little concerned to see a swap partition given the limited write cycles of flash memory. The EEE's seem to manage without one but I presume with 512MB of ram the built in applications such as firefox and openoffice can need it. Personally though I think the swappiness in the kernel is set a little too aggressively which might result in unnecessary flash wear and extra battery drain.

I added  

sysctl -w vm.swappiness=1

To /etc/rc.local to bring this down from the default of 60, feel free to experiment with this. It is possible that turning it back this far will have a negative impact on performance as less physical memory will be available for drive caching..however I haven't noticed anything undue yet.

Adding icons to the Acer launcher desktop is as simple as providing a pointer to the existing .desktop file (usually found in  /usr/share/applications/ )

 /home/user/.config/xfce4/desktop/group-app.xm

The syntax should be pretty obvious from the existing entries they are separated by section just be careful not to repeat entry numbers, reordering them as required.

If you really don't like the launcher then you can disable it by editing  /etc/xdg/xfce4-session/xfce4-session.rc

and changing the line 

Client0_Command=xfdesktopnew to Client0_Command=xfdesktop-xfce

If you do that (I haven't) then you probably want to enable XFCE's right click button with  xfce-settings-show