I was in the market for a laptop, and if I am anything, it's a frugal gadget geek.  I'm always buying gadgets, but I'm cheap about it.  Buy.com had a deal on refurbished HP DV9627CL laptops for $700.  While that's not cheap, it's a pretty loaded laptop, with a 17 inch widescreen, dual core 64bit processor, 2 GB memory, 200 GB HDD, and so on.  This thing isn't super portable, but it's well equipped for a developer like me. 

Unfortunately, it came with the Microsoft tax that I didn't want.  But I haven't seen anything else with these kind of stats running Linux for this price.  Dell's Linux laptops were sad, in my opinion.  Worse yet, reports of Linux support for this laptop were sketchy.  I took a blind leap and bought it anyway.

I'm happy to report that I was able to get everything working in Ubuntu Linux, with the exception of hibernate.  I started with a Gutsy live CD.  I did the process the first time with the 32 bit version of Gutsy, then after success, I repeated with the 64 bit version a couple of days later, and both worked fine.  The choice is yours.  I like having a fully 64 bit operating system, but it comes at the price of not always having access to some applications (like Skype) and more difficulty installing others (like the Java plugin).

The first trick is, when the installer CD comes up, choose to Start Ubuntu in Safe Graphics Mode.  The standard graphics option won't work.  After that, the install process should be fairly normal.  Once Ubuntu is installed, we have three major issues, and one of them is that wifi won't run.  I suggest hooking up a LAN cable so you can install software that will fix the problem.

1. We still have VESA graphics.  This one is pretty simple to fix.  Go to System > Administration > Restricted Drivers Manager and enable the Nvidia driver.  Once installed, you can restart or just hit CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to restart X.   At this point, you should be able to increase your resolution, and enable Compiz effects, System > Preferences >Appearance > Visual Effects tab.
2. The next issue is, we have no wifi.  I really struggled to fix this.  First I tried the Broadcom 43xx driver in the Restricted Driver Manager, but using the firmware extraction utility on the Vista driver that comes with this laptop utterly failed.  I even tried the compiling newer versions from source, and this also failed.  Next, I tried to use ndiswrapper on the driver that came with the laptop, but that too fails.  Again, I downloaded the latest ndiswrapper source code and compiled, but that didn't work either.  I was just about to shove my pcmcia wifi card in the socket, but then I noticed lspci reported that the wireless chipset name was BCM94311MCG.  A Google search turned up this page.  The first thing to point out is, ignore the the part about removing ndiswrapper-common and ndiswrapper-utils-1.9 (the first line of Step 1).  Also ignore the part about installing ndiswrapper from source (all of Step 5).  The version currently in Gutsy is current enough.  Just make sure you've updated using Synaptic or apt-get (sudo apt-get update & sudo apt-get upgrade).   Follow the rest of the instructions, and before you know it you'll have wifi working in network manager.
3. Finally, we have no webcam support.  The webcam is a Chicony Electronics HP Web Cam.  A little googleing shows that uvc supports this camera, but uvc isn't available from apt.  But, we can build the source and get it.  Create a directory called uvc somewhere, and enter into this directory in the command line.  Then, we need to install subversion.

sudo apt-get install subversion

Next, we need to get uvc from its subversion repository.

svn checkout svn://svn.berlios.de/linux-uvc/linux-uvc/trunk

Now we have to build it:

cd trunk
make
sudo make install

Then start the module.

sudo modprobe uvcvideo

Not all programs seem to like working with this driver for some reason.  But Ekiga works great, so I know it's working. 

That's prety much it, other than hibernate.  Not sure what the trick to that is, but if you know, please leave a comment.