My second gadget in the past week was a new laptop. I've discussed this before and ended up with the R200. Built in bluetooth + wireless and 512MB RAM; more than my old N200. I'd seen Chris Walker's R100 at Steve's annual August BBQ and he said he was happy with build quality, so that convinced me. It's very nice; light, looks good, even came with a little cloth to put between the screen and keyboard when it's shut (numerous people have told me they put a piece of paper in or similar for their laptops to avoid finger muck getting on the screen, so I thought it was a nice touch by Toshiba).

Installation was fun (in a sick, I like fiddling sort of way). No removable drives. And the in built ethernet isn't supported by a stock kernel. Hmmm. So I ended up booting from an SD card that happens to have GRUB on it in my SD/USB convertor, and then reading the mini install ISO off my iAudio, and then doing the rest of the install over the network using a PCMCIA 8139too based card I had lying around. If I'd had a big enough SD card or USB memory stick the easy solution would have just to do a full install off that, but I don't.

The whole thing is patchtastic. The internal GigE ethernet isn't supported by 2.6.13, but you can download a patch from Marvell. The internal wireless is Atheros, which needs the non-free madwifi driver (though I must try the Free ath-driver at some point). Bluetooth appears as a normal USB device, supported by hci_usb. However it doesn't appear on the bus without an ACPI patch to allow toshset to enable it (I possibly could have enabled /dev/toshiba support as well). The video is an i915 chipset, which isn't supported by the XFree86 in Etch, so I'm waiting for xorg to propagate from Sid before installing X. Good job I'm a text mode junkie, eh?

That sounds like a bad review, but I'm really happy with it. Everthing is actually supported (well, except the SD slot and the fingerprint reader), just not in the default kernel. It's light, it looks cool, I'm easily getting 3+ hrs battery life out of it and that's before I've looked at doing stuff like laptop-mode or auto cpufreq.

Oh, and although I'm running Debian on it, the Ubuntu R200 wiki page was really useful as a starting point.