I just bought my daugter an AMD64 laptop for her graduation gift. Enpower, house brand for PC Club. Came with MSI motherboard, Radeon Xpress 200, Realtek ethernet and RT2500 wireless built in.

Installed Etch 32-bit because she needs OpenOffice, and anyway, Debian's AMD64 distro is in a mild state of disoranization right now. Everything installed out of the box except the Wireless. Had the normal period of banging my head against that, but got it working in a few hours. Using the xorg radeon drivers for video ... she's not a game player, and I think I would have problems getting their proprietary driver going. It did pick up the wide-screen immediately (1440x900). Looks mighty nice.

I do have one question, but I may have solved it already. I took it back to the store today for a minor hardware problem, and it didn't pick up their wireless network. I looked at /etc/network/interfaces, and it included the line 'wireless ESSID = default' Default is my router essid. I commented that line out, and it still works fine at home.

Perhaps it was just looking for a network named 'default' at the store, and now it'll be fine out in the real world?