Got a new lappy the other day to replace the sad Toshiba.  It had developed a problem where sound events were causing the wireless card to fail (yes, I know that sounds crazy).  And I was generally unhappy with it’s overall heft and refusal to have power management capabilities.  I had originally looked at getting a Lenovo, but they were kind of pricey and didn’t seem anymore likely to work with Linux then the HP’s I was looking at.  So far everything is great with the laptop, though there were a few things I had to fiddle with:

Sound

The sound card didn’t work with the version of ALSA that came with Jaunty; though, there’s a lot of commotion about it not working real well with a lot of cards so upgrading was fairly well documented. I went here.  There’s also an option I had to set in “/etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf”
options snd-hda-intel model=hp-m4 enable_msi=1
So far that seems to have done the trick, though sometimes on suspend/resume sound doesn’t come back; probably restarting alsa would do the trick.

Wireless

Mine came with a generic wifi card that required the ath9k driver.  I was real worried when I saw that because I had previous bad experience with the Madwifi/Ath5k drivers on the Toshiba.  However, the 9k series seems to be much better, and I haven’t experienced the dropped signals that can only reconnect after a restart that I was having witha the Toshiba.  You’ll have to grab a newer kernel then what comes with Jaunty by pulling from the backports:
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-jaunty-generic
Restart and you’re good.

Video

I agonized over this for days: The NVIDIA Geforce G 105M was unsupported by the binary drivers when I ordered the lappy.  I took a gamble that support would reach Linux soon.  Well, my gambit paid off and Nvidia added support in their latest beta release of the proprietary driver.  Follow this link to the NVNews forum and grab the highest numbered installer.  Installation is pretty straight-forward from there; shutdown X and run the install as root (you’ll probably need to run “chmod ugo+x” to grant it execution privileges).

And that’s pretty much it.  Everything else just seems to work, including the brightness controls and other random function keys.  I’m not too crazy about the keyboard, but I’m not a big fan of many laptop keyboards.  I highly recommend it to any Linux users

UPDATE:

There’s a funky issue with the battery “disappearing” after a resume from suspend.  It appears to be a known issue with the HP laptops and the kernel devs appear to have addressed it for another model.  If I get a chance I’ll try rolling my own kernel and seeing if the fix works for my laptop.

UPDATE of UPDATE

Weird.  I protected this post after I updated it.  Oh well, here it is again