My wife will soon be able to buy brand new laptop from her work. It's installed with Windows XP Pro, and I was thinking of format the hd as soon as possible.

I'd like to install Debian Sarge or Ubuntu on it, with Gnome, but would like to know if I could expect serious problems with that. We just talking about installing the OS now.

The laptop, a Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M1437 G, with Intel 915PM+ICH6M chipset, and ATI Mobility Radeon X700 128 graphics. It have both onboard 54Mbps WLAN (Intel PRO/2200BG) and 10/100/1000 Mbps/s integrated networking on mb. DVD burner is also built-in.

Any suggestions would be apreciated

TIA

You might consider downloading Knoppix or one of the other LiveCD distro's and trying them out on your hardware. You can also run the knoppix iso straight from the ntfs partition if you like.