My Opinions

Blank screen at boot after install

Debian Squeeze or Ubuntu 10.10 on this machine will leave more than one person puzzled: after a seemingly uneventful install, the laptop reboots, and after the initial boot phase, you are left with a blank screen. This is due to the fact that the stock kernel coming with these distributions (2.6.32) includes by default an old version of the OSS nouveau driver for the Nvidia cards, which does not support the modern graphics card on this machine. Solution: reboot your machine passing the following option on the kernel line

nouveau.modeswitch=0

This will allow you to get through the booting process with a VESA screen: now, get a network connection, and install the Nvidia proprietary driver

apt-get install nvidia-glx

Sound

Alsa supports the sound quite properly, the internal microphone is recognised.

Synaptic

this is not recognised by the kernel, that only sees a PS2 device. Also, sometimes while you type the cursors moves somewhere else on the screen (not that often, but it happens), but this may be well due to the placement of the trackpad.

Suspend/Hibernate

Suspend to RAM works out of the box, but after resume, you might find yourself staring at a console with error messages... just hit Alt-F7 (if your X screen is on vt number 7) to go back to X. Sometimes, though, suspend to RAM crashes or kills the X server randomly after resume. I did not use hibernation enough to compare to Suspend to Ram, but it seems to work rather often, and crash sometimes. All the troubles seem to be related to the NVidia proprietary driver.

eSata/USB/Wireless

All work perfeclty (and eSata is really a pleasure!)

New kernel 2.6.38

The version packaged in Debian unstable as of March 23rd does not solve any of the issues reported above :-(

Running 32bits applications

Make sure you install the 32 bits compatibility libraries, and in particular the ones for 3D, and also the lsb-core apt-get install lsb-core nvidia-glx-ia32

The equipment onboard

For reference, here is the output of lspci

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor DMI (rev 11)
00:03.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 11)
00:08.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Management Registers (rev 11)
00:08.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Semaphore and Scratchpad Registers (rev 11)
00:08.2 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor System Control and Status Registers (rev 11)
00:08.3 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor Miscellaneous Registers (rev 11)
00:10.0 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link (rev 11)
00:10.1 System peripheral: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Routing and Protocol Registers (rev 11)
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82577LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 05)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset High Definition Audio (rev 05)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev 05)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 2 (rev 05)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 3 (rev 05)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset PCI Express Root Port 4 (rev 05)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset USB2 Enhanced Host Controller (rev 05)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev a5)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 5 Series Chipset LPC Interface Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.2 RAID bus controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 82801 SATA RAID Controller (rev 05)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 5 Series/3400 Series Chipset SMBus Controller (rev 05)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation GT218 [NVS 3100M] (rev a2)
01:00.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)
03:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 (rev 35)
04:00.0 CardBus bridge: Ricoh Co Ltd Device e476 (rev 02)
04:00.1 SD Host controller: Ricoh Co Ltd MMC/SD Host Controller (rev 03)
04:00.4 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Ricoh Co Ltd FireWire Host Controller (rev 03)
3f:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture Generic Non-Core Registers (rev 04)
3f:00.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QuickPath Architecture System Address Decoder (rev 04)
3f:02.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Link 0 (rev 04)
3f:02.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor QPI Physical 0 (rev 04)
3f:03.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller (rev 04)
3f:03.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Target Address Decoder (rev 04)
3f:03.4 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Test Registers (rev 04)
3f:04.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Control Registers (rev 04)
3f:04.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Address Registers (rev 04)
3f:04.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Rank Registers (rev 04)
3f:04.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 0 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)
3f:05.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Control Registers (rev 04)
3f:05.1 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Address Registers (rev 04)
3f:05.2 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Rank Registers (rev 04)
3f:05.3 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Core Processor Integrated Memory Controller Channel 1 Thermal Control Registers (rev 04)