I have come to the realization that I am pretty much going to have to put up with just running M$ Winders XP on my laptop for a while, because I can't seem to make Linux work properly, or even tolerably, on this hardware. I have tried and tried everything I know to make several distros run on here, but with no success. I have read many reviews about my Laptop, the Sharp PC AL-27, all of them good, but no one seems to want to run anything open source on it.

Enough complaining, onto the questions:

First of all, has anyone successfully installed any *nix OS on one of these?

Before I go any further, I have to say that I consider myself an experienced Linux user, but I do not intend to install something hardcore (like Gentoo or some other source based distro) unless there is no alternative. There have been many many developers putting a lot of time into packaging things up nice and neat, so why not make use of it? Just my point of view. Here are the distros I have tried to install on here and where they have fallen short:

Mandrake 10.0 i586 - Video SUCKED using Vesa, anytime I log out or the screen saver turned on, I had to physically hold the power button down and power it off and reboot to see anything. No support for Synaptics Mousepad features. Fan constantly on. No APM support (thus the battery dies in less than 25 min). The list goes on.

Mandrake 10.1 i586 - No noticeable difference from previous except KDE had a battery on the panel that couldn't determine how much power is left anyways.

Mandrake 10.2 x86_64 RC1 - Video, although still using Vesa, works a little better. Just takes 5 min from power on to login screen because of long pause between startup scripts running and KDE login screen where the screen just stays black. Still kills battery, but seems to perform a lot better with the x86_64 extensions in use.

Fedora Core 2/3/4 x86_64/i586 - All the same problems. It seems to work a lot better with the Vesa drivers, but impossible to get the wireless working, because the kernel doesn't allow ndiswrapper to be installed. Still no APM support, and Synaptics drivers suck.

Suse 9.1 Free Download - Obviously I am not going to throw down $50 to buy a Linux distro, even I knew it was going to work, so I used the free one. Wouldn't stop complaining about the screen resolutions on startup. No hope for wireless, APM, or correct mouse support.

Ubuntu 5.4 i586 - Wouldn't even make it to a KDE login prompt after install. I guess it mis-configured the video drivers on install, and gives me no option to change them.

My next step was going to be try just straight Debian, since Ubuntu didn't give it a fair chance. But I don't want to waste all my time setting up X if its not going to work anyways. Anyone have any success with any of these? If so, what did you do to make it work? Any help will be appreciated.