need laptop advice

[Jim March]

As to the laptop: both Best Buy and Office Depot have recently been
selling a Compaq at $399 that has an NVidia 8200m chipset...very cool
if you're at all into games :).  It has 2gig RAM, 160gig HD, 15.4"
screen size (1280x800), three USB ports, but lacks an expresscard
slot.  The WiFi chip is an Atheros 5007 series, it has an AMD
dual-core chip that supports hardware virtualization (tested and
working in VirtualBox 2.0.6 - you have to turn hardware virtualization
ON in the BIOS).

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=9027698&type=product&id=1218010578770

A friend just bought two of these.  I installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid,
had no problems AT ALL.  I did have to blacklist the Atheros drivers
and install a backported module pack to get the Ath5k project driver
working...let me know if you need help with that.  They should have
included it in Intrepid but it didn't quite make cut-off.  Works very
well though.

Overall I was very impressed.  The lack of an Expresscard slot and the
three USBs were the only flaws I could see.  Oh, and no HDMI video
port (no biggie to me).  Build quality appeared more than decent.

As to the serial port: run the "full tilt" edition of Virtualbox from
the Sun repositories or downloaded if you use a non-Debian distro.
This gives you USB pass-through.  Should work great.

Jim