I've no experience of the UBISurfer, but on netbooks more generally, my wife has an Acer Aspire. It's a rather impressive little gadget, and quite fast too running what I think is Linpus Lite: it boots in about 15 seconds. I don't much care for the OS as it's difficult to find the admin tools to tinker with it (it took a bit of head scratching and muttered cursing to track down a terminal), so I'd go along with HM and either put a full blown Linux installation on it, or maybe something light but more adaptable like Puppy or DSL. I also find the keyboard cramped and tend to get a lot of typos, but that's only to be expected, really.