Finally things start to work flawlessy on this laptop.
Well, it did work quite nicely already, but there were some highly annoying issues with it.
First it was the sound which didn't work out of the box. With the help of the downloaded en compiled most recent source files of Alsa and with a setting of 'model'=hp-m4 i got it working. A few weeks ago i noticed that this extra setting wasn't needed anymore.
I haven't tested all of the features of the soundcard, yet. Recently i experienced that the speakersound wasn't switched of when plugging in a headphone.
Another mayor problem for a long time was that when X was restarted the driver crashed and only produced garbled mess on the screen. This also means that i couldn't log off and log in as another user. I had to restart the computer.
This seems to be finally solved with the newest Catalyst driver 9.4.
Wireless network had some issues in the last months: I'm using Networkmanager-applet KDE4 and applet for KDE3 at the same time. Mostly because the KDE4 applet wasn't very stable. Several times i installed an update and then i had to put back the older version for de Networkmanager AND both applets.
All tree had to be exact the right version (or better said: same repository).
I'm still using source files from the most recent madwifi-hal, but i'm not sure if this is still needed.
But since i use a custum build kernel i can't use the modules shipped with OpenSuSE 11.1.
And last but not least: Suspend. it worked almost perfect, except for the fact that i couldn't use a keyboard or touchpad anymore. Luckily the on/off button shuts down the computer cleanly which i used frequently to restart the computer after trying resume. I created a little script in /etc/pm/sleep.d/ to reinit the ps/2 port which made the keyboard working, not the mouse.
But now with a recent bios update (F.43) this seems to be finally solved and i don't need that script anymore
It's definitely worth checking for updates since i have seen about 4 updates since i bought this laptop.
Unfortunately you need Windows to install these updates.
Several minor things might be fixed, yet.
Not all touch buttons work.
The laptop feels a bit hot when working with it. Maybe some intelligent battery-loader or powersaving hardware is not working under Linux.
I have to test Compiz, which doesn't seem to like ATI cards
I want to connect with my Nokia N79 mobile phone
etc.
So in the end: Was it a good idea to put Linux on this laptop. Well, i think yes, but not on a very recent computer model, because it will take time before drivers become stable and working. i bought this laptop in october and initially i had very bad hope i would have luck with this one. But it turned out that this type is quite popular which means there are soon good opensource drivers.
And Vista on this laptop isn't perfect either: touch-buttons don't work, touchpad moves sluggish and i can't use the 64-bit capabilities because it came preinstalled with 32-bits Windows.
This Windows Vista is worthless anyways: The computer comes without installation disks but with a crippled Windows Install sytem on the recovery partition. As far as i know there's no way of reinstall Windows from this partition without entirely wipe Linux from the harddisk. Vista is outdated anyways, because Windows 7 is already coming up. I'm afraid major companies will soon leave Vista and leave driver development.
I'm wondering how much i have payed for this unwanted Windows Vista :S