Well, speaking of laptops a few entries back, I'm now typing this on my own new laptop, yes, I've finally gone mobile... :-)

I just picked it up last week, good thing too- when I got back home, the Internet was out, we've ordered a new service provider, but in the meantime, I can borrow a neighbors signal to check email, update my blog :-)
...a few weeks later,,,
And so now I'm back online and have some time to expand on this...
The laptop is a Gateway with an AMD64 processor. It unfortunately came bundled with M$ crap (when I asked the guy at the store if I could get it without it, he just stared at me blankly...), but, I didn't even boot into it, I went into the bios when I first turned it on, checked that it would boot from cd (and checked some other settings), inserted the Ubuntu disk and rebooted onto it. I immediately installed my preferred OS :-)
Well, almost, at first, while I was in Toronto, I used Ubuntu instead of Kubuntu because I didn't have the 64bit version of Kubuntu with me. Once home, I then did a fresh install of Kubuntu...
I am preferring KDE, it has lots of handy little programs for doing things...

When I first  got up and running, everything more or less worked. I knew the first thing I would want to sort out was the video card. I went over to ubuntuforums.org and put in
the model (ATI RADEON XPRESS 200M) and found this howto:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=321766
Following it, I got beryl up and running (so I can do the 3D desktop thing with all those crazy effects), but I only put it on once in a while, the driver is still limited, so it's a bit of a drain on resource and some things can be a little unstable, but ATI does seem to be progressing in terms of supporting Open Source, and there's a lot of community support on the OS side, if for no other reason than ATI hardware is so wide spread- and ATI (which is now owned by AMD) is recognizing that the Open Source desktop is a growing market...

Down at the bottom of that HOWTO post, it had a handy bit of advice for setting up my wireless, 2 lines of code and the wireless "just worked"-
with the first Ubuntu install, the Wireless Assistant was installed by default as part of the Gnome desktop, I seem to remember it just coming up when I rebooted...
With Kubuntu, it has KWiFi Manager, but, to have some choices, I also installed the Wireless Assistant and another program called Wicd. I don't have any of them on by default, I keep them in a panel menu and run them specifically when I want to connect. For an open system (no need for WEP or WAP), I usually just use the Wireless Assistant- it has a minimal footprint, but isn't as tweakable as KWiFi or Wicd.

I've managed to get the desktop sharing (VNC- Virtual Network Control) thing happening between my laptop and my desktop box (using Krfb and Krdc). It's pretty cool- the desktop of my box comes up in a screen on my laptop and I can control my desktop box from anywhere in the house- and technically I could open a port so that I could do so from anywhere on the Internet, but I wouldn't want to open my box to that kind of security risk- as it is, it needs to accept the incoming connection from the laptop on the box, and requires a password as well... but, then I have full control over one computer with the other- totally cool- as long as I have control over it- pretty scary otherwise...

What hasn't been working very well is the suspend/hibernate thing- it takes longer to go into hibernate than to fully shut down (which is very fast- the startup and shutdown are pretty snappy!) and when it wakes up it's a bit of a Frankenstein's monster that I have to Ctrl-Alt-Backspace out of it's misery. And when I come back out of suspend my touchpad doesn't work (an issue that I saw a bug reported for, I'll keep checking and there will probably be a solution come up for it)... For now I just shutdown when I'm not using it, it starts up pretty quick, so it's no big deal...

As for the Synaptic Touchpad, not only does it work, but it is nothing short of a revelation! I have a USB mouse that I thought I would be using because my past experiences with the "pads" on laptops have not been good- but I have seen the light! Although, this is way more evolved than the ones I've tried before- it has a "scroller" like a mouse wheel along the right edge- I love my mouse wheel, but this is so much more "graceful" :-) and, if I run my finger along the bottom edge it will horizontally scroll in windows where that's available, or in Firefox, it moves back and forth through your history :-)
It has "tapping"- once on the pad for a click, twice for double click, or tap-tap and drag to click and hold to select a region. For middle mouse clicks (in Firefox it opens a link in a new tab if you click on it with the mouse wheel) you "tap" with two fingers side by side on the pad... Like I said- it's just so graceful, it takes a delicate touch at the default settings, but I'm getting used to it fast. I did find a tutorial on adjusting all kinds of things on it, including making it less sensitive, but so far I'm liking it!

I recorded a night of Full Metal Booty, the 08 02 2007 set in here:
http://sketchbin.webmadman.net/fmb/2007/
I used Ardour,  and everything was hunky dory, but then I realized it was in mono- I checked and it seems the microphone input- the only one on the laptop- is only in mono! The output is fine, but, I guess there serious about it being a "mic" input... gr-argh! Well, most of my own recording only mono vocals anyway, but still, that's annoying... not unlike, this specific model does not have s-video out- the outline of the hole for it is there, but no jack... but I wasn't expecting that in the first place, and probably was a factor in it being so inexpensive...

So that's the story so far...