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Several years ago I purchased an Acer Aspire One ZG5 for the relative bargain of £85. It served me well as a netbook for a couple of years, I replaced the default Linux Operating System with Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook edition and enjoyed using it. System resources were relatively sparse having an Intel Atom 1.6GHz processor, 512MB RAM and an 8MB Video card. However, courtesy of severe butterfingers, I managed to break the screen. I could have replaced it, but this would have cost me half of the original purchase price of the machine, and I had a Dell Latitude E6400 laptop to use while travelling, so the netbook simply got filed away in a drawer for a few months.
After around 6 months, I decided to reboot the netbook using a TV as a monitor, to see whether it still worked at all, and it did! I had a spare 1GB memory chip lying around from a previous PC upgrade, and decided to install that into the netbook, to see whether performance improved. It did, but things still weren't lightning fast. I had heard about XBMC previously, and installed it. Even with the extra memory, the whole system seemed slow. I was aware of Ubuntu derivatives such as Lubuntu, Kubuntu and Xubuntu, and decided that I would install one of them to see hot much better things were.
I opted for Lubuntu 12.04, installing from a USB CD drive as I has trouble encouraging my machine to boot from USB stick. Once Lubuntu was installed, I connected via ethernet to the adjacent router, and installed XBMC 11.0, and selected a few plugins for XBMC, the iPlayer plugin being of the most interest to me. I also installed the Quartz skin as I knew that this was a lighter skin than the default.
The install was flawless, and before long I was experimenting with the plugins, some of which were more polished than others. I purchased a Microsoft branded Wireless keyboard and mouse, and these were simply plug and play, as was a USB infra-red remote control purchased from ebay for £3. This little netbook has been quietly soldiering on in this arrangement for the last 6 months. I have set it up so that I can now stream audio and video from a shared drive in the house, and have even used it for a barbecue party in my garden.
Because of the very limited hardware of this machine, it would be unrealistic to expect super High Definition at all times, but I can stream video from almost any data source. Spotify for Linux works without issue. Video is connected via VGA to my television, and audio via phono cable to our surround sound. If there is ever anything that we would like to play that XBMC cannot handle, we can simply launch Chromium and play via the browser.
On paper, this little netbook ought to be almost useless, but, for the princely sum of £20, I have resurrected this little workhorse, and it is now at the centre of my family's viewing experience.