I first installed Slackware on this unit. If you are familiar with Slackware you shouldn't have a problem. I am currently running Ubuntu and everything works great after a little tweaking.

Issues
Hard drive - The laptop uses a sata controller so any distro that uses 2.6 kernel should detect them as /dev/sda. If you are using 2.4 then will be detected as /dev/hda and is extremely slow. So either use a distro with 2.6 or build a new kernel as soon as you install.

Wireless - Works out of the box on Ubuntu or use IPW2200 drivers from sourceforge(included in ubuntu).

S/D Card Reader - Havent got this to work yet.

GRUB - if you use a distro that uses GRUB you will need to pass a framebuffer arg. to keep the screen from scrolling on install/bootup. Not an issue with Lilo.

CPUScaling works great(may need a custom kernel)

Media Buttons, Battery Monitor, USB, FireWire, etc all work great.

Love the 15.4" screen and speed. A little heavy, but I wanted a desktop replacement,so thats what I got.

Ubuntu was the "best' overall install with least amount of tweaking.

soule

If you ordered the WUXGA (1920x1200) display on this model, it might not work from the first boot. To be able to use the full native resolution, you'll have to install 915resolution, then set it to patch the video BIOS at boot time.
A good place to start with the startup script is here. You have to replace the line
/usr/sbin/915resolution 5c 1400 1050 32
with ones appropriate to your machine, as in the following, which are what I use:
/usr/sbin/915resolution 41 1680 1050 32
/usr/sbin/915resolution 42 1920 1200 32
Then make it run at boot, using update-rc.d . Something like
update-rc.d 915resolution start 12 2 3 4 5 . stop 12 1 6 .
will work if you saved the script to /etc/init.d/915resolution . Of course you'll have to edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or the XF86 equivalent) to reflect the new resolutions.

Inspiron 6000 with 17" Widescreen display. Everythnig worked immediatly. USB, bluetooth, wireless, sound, everything. I have not tested the firewire as I have no firewire devices, however.

Running dual boot with XP Media Edition installed using wubi.exe.

Issues: SATA hard drive can cause Kernel panic due to VFS that does not sync on boot after kernel upgrade. Boot using previous kernel, then run dpkg --configure -a to find and sync the new kernel. Reboot using new kernel.

Video: haven't yet installed 915resolution to go over 1024 x 768, but I plan to.

Running full Linux install using all of the HDD, running KDE 4.4.5 and running Windows XP in Virtualbox.

Issues: Intel WiFi firmware (ipw2100) has to be added either during setting up or later manually using apt-get. (Wired network connection required for netinstall.)

Everything was running from the beginning including touchpad, multimedia keys on front, usb, etc.