Which laptop did you finally decide to get?
Thanks.
I got the Compaq R3000z with an Athlon 64 3400+, 1G RAM, 60G drive,
1680x1050 screen and built in 802.11G. The 802.11G card was free
otherwise I wouldn't have gotten it since it's useless (no Linux drivers
and no 64 bit Windows drivers which are necessary for ndiswrapper). The
Compaq R3000z and the HP zv5000z are identical except for color. The HP
cost $200 more, not clear why. The big screen is nice but It makes the
laptop a little unwieldy, I think if I had it to do over I'd get the
smaller screen. The one thing I absolutely would not buy again is the HP
carrying case, it's not much better than a shopping bag. The case came in
a bundle with a mouse and a USB cable, skip it and just get a third
party mouse and case.
I put Mandrake 10.0 AMD64 edition on it. It installed without to much
fiddling. The only thing that required any hacking was the XFConfig file
to get it to support the 1680x1050 screen. If you get the standard screen
it will work right out of the box. The other thing that I had to do was
build a 2.6.8.1 kernel to get the Cool & Quiet clock speed control to
work. That was very simple to do. Once you have a kernel that supports
Cool & QUiet, switching clock speeds is trivial, just echo the clock speed
into the scaling_setspeed file.
echo 2200000 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_setspeed