I have isstalled several distros on this pc, RH 7.2, RH 9, Slack 8, 10, 10.1, Ubuntu 4.10 (I think) and FreeBSD 4.6. I currently use slack 10.1 on it and it works great, no real problems that I can think of. I do recall some power management issues with some of the older versions. FreeBSD 4.6 was not a great fit if I can remember correctly. Sorry for the vagueness but that's what I remember. Contrary to what some may say, Compaq made a killer laptop (business class, not presario) all of course before they got eaten by HP.

I have only had a few problems with this laptop. I can't get the irda, volume/shortcut/fn keys and powersave mode to work. I have not tried the modem, so i cannot comment on it.
the display is beautiful, i get a fair number of FPS with glxgears (between 160 and 190), ethernet works out of the box, sound is good (altho, the sound modules are broken in the 2.6.13 kernel....they work in 2.6.12, tho), usb, floppy, cdrom, touchpad, everything but the things mentioned above works great!

900MHz PIII
256MB PC100
14.1"
Netgear WG511T
24x cdrom

my lspci is different than the original poster's. mine has:
00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corp. 82557/8/9 [Ethernet Pro 100] (rev 09)
00:09.1 Serial controller: Lucent Microelectronics LT WinModem

instead of the ethernet/modem that (s)he had.