I haven't tried the new Ubuntu yet, but I have managed to get a fairly stable version of Debian Squeeze onto this machine.

I installed Debian Squeeze from the stable DVD without many problems. As soon as I tried to do the initial update the system froze with the now all-to-familiar "fuzzy screen freeze".

On the subsequent reboot I appended acpi=off to the boot line and managed to do the rest of the updates.

There are only a few issues with the system as of right now:

It's using kernel version 2.6.32-5-686 (an older kernel, but the most current in Debian Squeeze stable)

The audio hardware was detected on first install and then I lost it after a few updates. It took a while to realize that I only have audio after a full power-cycle shutdown. If I reboot without power-cycling, I lose the audio hardware. This is so far unresolved.

I had to download the wifi driver from realtek (making sure to get the version for the earlier kernel version), but a "make", "make install" and a reboot later - wifi was fine.

I'm stuck with 1024x768 resolution. I tried to apt-get install the fglrx modules, but all I achieved was the only "fuzzy screen freeze" I've had since the initial install.

Not all the function keys work. Notably the enable/disable touchpad hotkey (FN-F9). (I hate when my palm touches the touchpad while I'm typing and throws the cursor off to some random part of the screen in the middle of a sentence...) Volume and Brightness seem OK though.

I'm still testing things but so far everything else seems fine. This isn't a solution, really, seeing as this machine should be capable of much better video, but at least I do have a linux working and apparently stable, so far.

I would be interested in hearing if anyone has any luck with the new Ubuntu.

__ Charlie.

Hello, i've got the same problem, i'm using right now fedora 14 and every thing works fine as long you don't use the web, if you add kernel parameter "nomodeset" it doesn't retrieve data from the web at all. I just want a linux distro that works with a basic web browser.

I was having the same problem of this computer either freezing up or just not connecting using the wireless card. In doing some research I have found that the network card (Atheros Communications AR8152 v1.1 Fast Ethernet) in this laptop has a lot of issues and in my own tests the freezing up primarily happened when I was using that interface. When I disable the LAN card in the bios the wireless seems to be connecting a whole lot faster, stays connected and the freezing up appears to have gone away. For reference I am running openSUSE 12.2 on it.

As Henchmen said I disabled the lan interface and it worked fine. I tested it on fedora 14 and fedora 16. That should be the problem.