UUID partition was mystery to me – according to all documentation available they make life easier instantly and you no longer have to worry about your partition letters. Since I'm using LVM on all servers I manage I already stopped worrying. But since this is preferred method now, I wanted to use it (especially after last time udev created /dev/mapper/vg-lv device, but no /dev/vg/lv device after boot and I realized that after my backups were week old and I had to restore corrupted file :().

But here's the problem with UUIDs and LVM: After you create new LV, vol_id and blkid will show their UUID. But as soon as you want to mount that LV via /etc/fstab, it yields Special device UUID=... does not exist. Today I learned this special command:

sudo partprobe

It updates the /dev/disk/by-uuid directory and your uuid mount works like a charm.

I just found clever post with steps to make more space available to your root partition by having /usr compressed with squashfs and overlayed with unionfs. So I'm adding it here as note to self to try it on my Ubuntu on USB disk, where I devoted to much space to NTFS partitions :) It also could be fine for Aspire One, if my wife will start to actually store any files there, not just do the browsing.

http://po-ru.com/…-the-eee-pc/

Oh yes, and according to this comment, Ubuntu 8.10 works nicely on Aspire One, so if I'll be willing to sacrifice nice bootup times of Linpus to more standard way of administration (at least for me), I might give that a try.