Picked up a new laptop at FutureShop for $999 (demo). It's an AVERATEC AV3250HX-01. Inside is an AMD Athlon XP-M 2200+ with 512MB RAM, 80GB HD (with a temp sensor!), DVD+-RW/CDRW combo drive, 3 USB ports, VGA out, 802.11g, 12.1'' XGA, 1'' thin and 4.3lbs light.
I proceeded to install Gentoo Linux. I'm using kernel-2.6. The kernel modules installed are:
via-rhine for the NIC
ehci-hcd, uhci-hcd, ohci-hcd for the USB
powernow_k7 for the powernowd (a nice userspace cpufreq daemon)
video, fan, thermal, ac, battery, processor, cpufreq_stats, freq_table, cpufreq_userspace (basically all the ACPI modules)
WIFI: `emerge rt2500` to get the 802.11g driver
SOUND: use ALSA's snd_via82xx