kumarnarain

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1.Ships with a light weight mandriva (LE 2005 or so)
2.Looks good
3.Looks rugged but a bit heavy to lug around
4.Good wide screen (if you are one of those who love visuals)

Now the flip side

1.Poor Documentation
2.Mouse hangs occassionally
3.Easy to put in the suff from Redmond
4.Linux install documentation doesn't exist
5.Good for geeks

Still installing the 64 bit Suse version..Will post more after I am through

chado

GOOD:

Everything worked in SUSE 10.0 Beta 3 out of the box, as well everything worked in Kubuntu/Ubuntu Hoary release. Fedora Core 4 worked but acted strange...very strange (would only boot 50% of the time, hanging the rest). Mixed luck with 64 bit distro's.

THE REALLY BAD:

When you update the kernel on any of these distro's (or try to use Suse 10.0's rls or presumably anything newer) the NIC drivers don't work.

My review can be summarized: If you get something working put up a strong firewall and don't upgrade it. Everytime I try to upgrade stuff breaks, I tried using a more 'from scratch' distro (slackware) since that's what I use on my servers...but the mouse & touchpad wouldn't work off the install...the NIC didn't work in that either.

It's a bit of a nightmare with this NIC so it might be worth investing in a cheap PCMCIA one.

Lenard

Overall this is a nice laptop for the price. Only a few problems related to Linux, the first and most important was the BIOS (3A27) is broken for Linux (battery monitor not available). The other was the built-in wireless, no native Linux drivers are available. Both problems are fixable, details following.

After updating to the 3A32 BIOS everything works without having to patch the kernel to workaround the 3A27 BIOS broken DSDT issue

Still have to use ndiswrapper for the built-in wireless to work. For x86_64 use the 64-bit drivers as suggested by the ndiswapper known working drivers wiki.

Lenard