Linux on the Acer 5100-5033

I recently purchased this machine. It comes with Vista Home edition and 1G RAM. I upgraded it to 2G, since I figured it would work much better.

Overview

The machine is very nice. Relatively light in weight, has a very bright and crisp screen. Vista booted fine; I created the "backup DVDs" as per Acer's recommendations. This machine has an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 1.6G CPU, built-in wifi, 120G HD, DVD R/W, and now 2G RAM.

I've had several other Acer machines in the past, and this one is very similar except the batter is quite different (so incompatible) and the keyboard layout is a little different. Fortunately, Acer replaced the push-buttons on the front of the case with slide-switches, so one cannot accidentally turn the wifi off. Of course, I also know that Acer machines often use weird or non-supported well hardware, so I was prepared for a bit of a struggle.

I had hoped to get Linux installed right away, but my usual distro did not install properly, nor did my Slax disk. After a bit of research, I found that both Kubuntu and Mandriva will work ok on this machine, but for some inexplicable reason neither includes the madwifi drivers, and they make it difficult to get them installed. Kubuntu also has an excessively "dumbed down" interface, which makes it difficult to "get things done". So I went back to the research department ...