Price paid GB £380 ~ US$600 (+ EasyportIV £100 ~ $160)

Almost everything seems to work perfectly out-of-the-box with Ubuntu Lucid (64bit) - the only exception being the fingerprint reader which is not recognised by fprint.

Upgrade to 4gb memory was easy and cheap - the laptop came with 1x 2gb stick so I only had to buy a single 2gb stick to go in the free slot. It can take up to 8gb, but that would cost as much as the laptop at the moment.

The SU2300 CPU gets good reviews, and VirtualBox seems to be able to use VT-x.

Battery life is excellent with default power management settings - probably something like 5 to 6 hours depending on what you're doing.

The laptop's a good size - thin and lightweight, but with a decent size screen and a usable keyboard and touchpad.

With restore images on the hard drive for both WinXP Pro and Win7 Pro (you can't run them both dual boot, you have to choose one or the other to have installed), about 40gb of the 160gb drive is taken up. I was able to resize partitions with gparted and leave Win7 bootable and the restore images in place, but I had less than 100gb of the disk to use by then. You could of course wipe windows off the disc completely, or put a bigger disc in if you wanted.

I also bought the Acer EasyPortIV docking station / port replicator - I wasn't sure how well this would work under linux, but I've been pleasantly surprised - I've not tested the DVI out on it yet, but the audio, USB, power, ethernet and VGA all seem to work fine, and Ubuntu seems to cope pretty well with the EasyPort being plugged and unplugged without having to restart X etc...

Not much changes in lspci, lsusb, lshw when I plug the EasyPortIV in - the only difference I can see is this extra line in lsusb:

Bus 002 Device 020: ID 05e3:0607 Genesys Logic, Inc.

...which I'm guessing is the extra USB hub (you get 4 more ports).

I'll post an update when I have a chance to test using the DVI output. I don't know how many externals monitors I'll be able to use at once - I've potentially got 2x VGA ports and a DVI with the EasyPortIV plugged in, but I don't really expect to be able to use all 3 with the built-in display at the same time.

Overall, very happy with this laptop for running Linux, and pleased that the EasyPortIV seems to work well.

[edit:] I've now tested the EasyPortIV with DVI as well as VGA monitors. It looks like the graphics chipset has 2 CRTCs and can only run two displays at once (although you might be able to run more than one display on each CRTC if the displays have identical timing, IIUC) So I've got two external monitors working plugged into the EasyPortIV, but only by switching the built-in display off.