A very good buy. This laptop comes with Windows XP, and for the moment I have kept it on a 17Gb partition. Another 3Gb is used by the Acer recovery files. The remaining 40Gb is used for Suse 10.2, with partitions for /home, /opt, /user/local, & swap, plus a 7Gb partition for evaluation of other distributions. At present it has  Mandriva 2007 installed. I use Grub as a bootmanager, installed on the MBR.<p>I started with Suse 10.1, but upgraded to Suse 10.2 as the main OS, with Mandriva for testing, and XP for one legacy application. I will in time try this with Wine, and hope to remove XP altogether.<br><br>My desktop is KDE 3.5.5. I did the Suse install by downloading the single network install disk and doing the Internet install, which worked OK. All hardware was detected and configured except for the modem, the wirelessadaptor, and the display.<br><br>Suse 10.1 had detected the 1280x800 display correctly during install, using the 855resolution tool. 10.2 uses 915resolution, and had set 1024x768. I had to manually force it to the correct setting by overwriting one of the listed modes, and writing a line into /etc/rc.d/boot.local to force the correct mode a start-up. This is documented fully in the Suse/Novell forum.<br><br>I haven't configured the modem yet, as this needs a Linmodem driver, which is available. This isn't a priority for me.<br><br>The Broadcom LAN adaptor was detected on install, and the IPN2220 was configured using ndiswrapper and the XP drivers. I use knetworkmanager to start it on boot, and it seems to be quite reliable. I haven't yet found a tool I like for managing wifi connections. There are several available, which I am testing.<br><br> I haven't looked into the various special keys for volume, brightness, etc. There are not a high priority. The only thing I do need and am activily trying to find a solution for is the battery level/charge indicator which doesn't work. This requires installation of lm_sensors.<br><br>I used the instructions on the Suse/Novell forum to configure multimedia, and have CD, DVD and streaming audio & video working fine. I usually test by play clips from the CNN website. So far I haven't found anything that dowsn't work. Kaffeine & Xine will play CD's and so far every DVD I have tried. As a contrast, PowerDVD on Win XP won't play all my DVD's!<br><br>My main use is for internet and e-mail, and I use Firefox and Thunderbird. Version 1.5.09 of Firefox is quite stable, but I have intermittents with Thunderbird 2, though this is still beta.<br><br>I also use GIMP, Quanta Plus for webdesign, and so far no problems. I use gFTP for upload/download.<br><br>I've had this laptop for just over a year now, and with Suse 10.2, it does everything I need. Apart from the one application, I can now do without Windows entirely, apart from testing websites in IE, and for that I will keep my old Compaq.<br><br>I would have no hesitation in recommending it as a general purpose portable for business or peasure.<br>