If you don't want to read to the end: If you want to run linux, stay away from this laptop. I work with linux for a living, and I'm about to get rid of it.

I bought it as a replacement for my HP laptop which died. I selected it for its superset of special features I wanted (in order: Nvidia CUDA-capable graphics, 14.1" screen, Firewire, Bluetooth, Gig Ethernet, b/g/n wireless, 2 card readers). Little did I know.

I got it to run only because I transplanted the dead HP's disk in here and tweaked it so it would boot. I have yet to be able to make a fresh Ubuntu installation on it. There is a by now well-documented problem that the X servers fail to read (or more likely they mis-read) the EDID info from the screen, and they believe that there is no actual screen attached. You get a black screen that cannot be made to show anything once it's in that state, you cannot even go back to console mode; the screen remains black.

The fix is to give the X server a cached EDID file like this (from my xorg.conf):

Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
Option "ConnectedMonitor" "DFP-0,DFP-1,CRT"
Option "CustomEDID" "DFP-0:/etc/X11/lcd_edid.bin"
EndSection

However, you'll need to be able to edit your xorg.conf file in the first place, and being able to capture the EDID. There is a package called read-edid which allows you to do that, the command is get-edid.

Once you have this set up, and X starts, the console screen, if you go back to it, is divided into 6 identical tiles which makes this very hard to work on the console. You better make sure that the X server really starts. I painted myself into a corner a few times when the EDID info didn't get there and I was looking at a black screen on an otherwise functional system. Luckily I had sshd running so I could log in and fix it. The machine will not recognize an external monitor unless you fire up nvidia-setup and manually enable it.

Then the dreaded and also well-documented issue of the screen brightness control... In first order, it isn't there. The Fn-F5/F6 keys for brightness down/up generate the right key codes, but nothing happens. The X server complains that it cannot find the brightness file (and it is not there indeed) and will not be able to control the brightness. This leaves you with a screen cranked up to full brightness, almost painfully bright, and this drains your battery in about 80 minutes. I kludged a way around this by installing the nvidia_bl kernel module that you have to add and compile yourself (google nvidia_bl-0.16, has to be 0.16 for the .34 kernel). This will give you a /sys/class/backlight/nvidia_backlight/brightness file which you can write to; there's another entry where you can read the actual brightness. I had to change the module's source file to get the brightness range right. If you think that's easy so far... I fudged the windows-F5/F6 key to decrement/increment the brightness (eventually I'll find out how to re-task the real keys). You disconnect the power adapter, the screen goes black - you have to reset the brightness value. I had to add something to the ac_adapter handler in the acpi script to do that. If DPMS kicks in and switches off the light, the touchpad or keyboard will not bring it on again; you need to work the brightness controls (because the X server does not control the brightness). All this took way more setup time and experimenting than I had budgeted for, and the handling is very non-intuitive.

Finally (this may not be exclusive to this model but is likely a driver issue) the wireless performance... The Atheros chipset uses the ath9k driver. It takes forever to connect to any network; you'll see that it connects and drops the connection many times before it finally "holds". With iperf I got, on different networks, a measly 600Kb/s average throughput, but there is a good amount of stop and go which you can easily see if you are running something remotely that continuously writes to the screen, such as running "top" on a remote machine - it freezes, then a flurry of updates, then nothing again. This makes it unusable for watching a youtube video or a skype video call. When I have a video conference I need to connect with the wired interface.

Speaking of the webcam: It works great, but for my taste it "looks" too far up, and its mount is fixed. For videoconferencing you need to tilt the screen forward towards you past the optimum angle in order to be fully in the cam's view... not great.

I had another issue with screen updates when using compiz. I have a number of machines with nvidia cards which run compiz, and my HP had that, never had a problem. The screen updates here are so sluggish that compiz (compiz-fusion to be exact) is useless. In particular when you make ncurses-style updates in the konsole terminal, the screen becomes completely garbled, but no application is immune to this. This makes it impossible to use, say, emacs -nw to edit a file. The kde window manager doesn't have this problem, but I really prefer compiz.

Now the positive: All the remaining features that drove me to select this model work :) Bluetooth, firewire, card readers, ...

And it does look very stylish.

Still. Avoid this model if you intend to run Linux.