Got Ubuntu 9.10 up and running on my laptop.

[hobbit709]

It took 18 minutes for the install from starting the CD to final reboot.
Compaq CQ60-215DX(2GHz Athlon X2, 2Gb RAM, 250 GB hard drive, DVD-RW, NVidia Geforce 8200M graphics.
Found and installed all hardware-only thing it doesn't do is turn the blue wireless light on-big deal.
Got the Totem video player to play DVD but no sound so I installed gxine and it plays DVD's just fine.
Installed SeaMonkey as the browser since I like it better than Firefox. Setup email-no problem once I corrected my spelling mistake in the server settings.

Works about twice as fast as it did with the original Vista and about 50% faster than it did with windows 7. I'm still tweaking a few settings but it looks like I'll keep this setup for a while.
I was already using GIMP on my Windoze machine, OpenOffice, etc. There's only about 3 windows apps that I haven't found a total equivalent for yet but they're not anything I really use a lot.

[madokie]

1. I did the same thing yesterday on our DIL's laptop

They're thrilled with it compared to the vista it came with. I partitioned the harddrive and done a duel boot. works great.