What distro/desktop environment did you use? Mine is working great with Ubuntu / GNOME, and I too got the front multimedia buttons working Where's the screen power on/off key? Esc/Standby? (standby doesn't work for me). The screen brightness keys work for me though.

I use gentoo for anything I care about, since I care about my laptop I used it. compiled from stage 1 all custom.

I said multimedia buttons in 'front' I have never used the extra keys liek suspend and disable all suspend stuff in kernel/software

but anyway I only have 1 issue w/ the laptop...
As a user starting X (not as root) it locks up about half the time and never enters X, and it is a full blown lock I need to power down by holding the button several seconds. It never has a problem as root, I thaught maybe a permissions problem, but thats not right because it sometimes works for a user. always the same user to, I have my main user (exodist) and root.

oh well I decided to end my boycot of X logins and use gdm on the laptop, since that is done as root for system startup it never fails and I have no problems.

a note on my boycot of X logins, when I first switched to linux and nvidia drivers were in their infancy, X logins were a nightmair, specially on slack 7.1 my first install, once I ended the X logins my life got much easyer. now several years later having long since switched to gentoo it is no longer an issue there... however all 3 of my desktops are dual screen, x logins don't handle it too well eather spanning in an annoying way or leaving once screen gray, plus I like to go directly to terminal. but on my laptop I guess X login is ok.

I myself am going with a Compaq precario r4000, simply because its the cheapest notebook with an AMD 64 bit processor. Maybe not your taste but I'm a developer looking into developing for 64 bit platforms, and oviously Linux is the OS to use for that as of now :P

It is in your price range, but here are some of the sys specs

CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ (up to 4000)
3200 - 2.0ghz 512kB L2 cache
3500 - 2.2ghz 512kB L2 cache
3800 - 2.4ghz 512kB L2 cache*
4000 - 2.4ghz 1.0mB L2 cache

Screen - 15.4" WXGA widescreen with BriteView

Video - 128MB ATI RADEON(R) XPRESS 200M w/Hypermemory

Memory - available 256mB - 2.0gb
1.0gB*

HDD - Available 40gB - 100gB
80gB @ 5400 rpm*

CD/DVD - Free upgrade to DVD/RW CD/RW combo
DVD/CDRW w/ Dual Layer support
Lightscribe DVD/CDRW w/ dual layer support*

Networking - 10/100 rj45 ethernet
Integrated 802.11b/g wireless
Integrated 802.11b/g wireless w/ bluetooth support *


There ya have it. The options w/ the * are what i specifically got on mine. Total it was $1400 so a pretty decent price too. Hope this helps a bit