Using Slackware Linux 13.1 on this machine has been interesting. Slackware rocks, and this is a nice fast laptop with 99% of all hardware supported stock with Linux. However, the graphics card is NOT friendly with Linux just yet. Any attempt to put the screen in a power saving mode results in a hard lock. The Linux kernel developers for the mobility radeon say they are working on direct support for this chipset, but as of yet it is not there. My advice: get some other computer if you want a 100% Linux-compatible screen. Otherwise, if you can tolerate the screen/graphics card issue with Linux, it's a very fast and beautiful laptop, especially for the price tag. Came stock with Windows 7 64bit (but who needs Windows? :)

Granted, the ATI proprietary drivers work with Slackware 13.37-rc1 and following, so one may decide to use those. They work well.

This laptop has some sort of MSI-related or USB-related issues with lock-ups however. I am attempting to figure out the source of the problem. dmesg shows BIOS MSI quirks. Booting with pci=nomsi works but at the expense of some udev/hotplug/automount functionality loss.