NEW Laptop is IN!

YEEEEHAAWWW ! I just had to say it. My new HP DV9000z came in Monday, which is why I haven't put anything on the site. Well, I have EVERYTHING working (well, the wireless works with linxant drivers). I tried every distro in the world, nearly, and some three times, but I finally got Debian testing installed on the thing. I still can't print to my Brother MFC-5840CN printer (if any of anyone who may read this knows how to overcome Brother's crappy Linux drivers I'd love to hear from ya').

Here's generally what I did:
1. I repartitioned the Drives deleting the partition from the second drive and shrinking the XP partition to 30 GB on the first drive. Whatever you do, DO NOT DELETE either the HP Rescue or the XP Embedded Partitions (that's the little hidden Partition at the end of the first drive). It took me 5 1/2 hours to restore everything to get the quickplay back.
2. I installed Debian etch with the Network install CD in text mode using the "noapic iommu=off" kernel switches. This got everything in place. To simplify things I just created an ext3 partition on the first drive filling the empty space for "/" or root, which turned out to be about 32 GB. I then created a 2.4 GB Swap partition (Don't ask about the .4 part I have no idea why I did that) and a /home partition on the second drive.
3. I installed just what the Debian presets were for Desktop, laptop etc. (they were the default selections) and I told it to use a mirror.
4. When all that was done I rebooted into recovery mode, or single user mode, brought up the Wired NIC, and adjusted my sources.list file to upgrade to Sid to get the 2.6.18 kernel (I'll post the link to the guys website who actually pioneered the setup later).
5. Then I did the usuall apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade stuff to get the latest and greatest. Hopefully you have better luck at this than I did initially. Make sure you get the 2.6.18 kernel. Once everything is finished updating, edit your /boot/grub/menu.lst file and remove the "noapic" from the load line for the new kernel, and reboot.
6. You should now get a shiney new Login screen GDM style (right now there's no KDE on it to speak of, you'll have to install that through synaptic).

From here you can do what you want. I installed the Nvidia driver using the installer from Nvidia's website to get the full 1680x1050 experience (AND IT IS SWEET!). Do some Googling for HP DV9000z linux and you should generally find all the same sites I did.
My MAJOR disappointments are that there are still NO 64bit versions of many apps. Adobe's Flash is still not available in a 64bit version. Google's toolbar will not install because of Debian's stupid renaming of Firefox to Iceweasel. Ndiswrapper doesn't work because only the 32bit windows driver is installed, if anyone knows how to get ndiswrapper working on this 64bit box, I'd be very happy to hear it, however the linuxant drivers work fairly well.

I'm not sure I'll leave Debian on there now that I know what it takes to install it on the machine. I'd really like to have Kubuntu running on the thing so that it matches all my other boxes, so I'll probably download the 64bit Edgy Alternate install CD, as the 32bit Live CD wouldn't even boot!

One thing I can say, this thing is Fast! So, anyway, I have 30 days on the Linuxant driver, so I'll have to do something quick. I'll keep this site posted.