I got my new notebook, and installed Linux on it. It is
mostly working. The only real problem I have had is with
resuming from a hibernate when I was in X. With X in 32-bit
mode, the display gets garbled. With 16-bit mode, the whole
machine locks up. Changing to another VT before hibernation
avoids the problem. I wonder if XFree86 4.0 would fix the
problem? It is probably caused by the Compaq bios not
saving enough of the state on the graphics card (enough for
the windows drivers but not enough for XF86_Mach64)
I was also upgrading another Linux box, and the installer
caused an exception just after installing all the packages,
so I had to set up the last few things by hand. A bit
annoying but not too difficult to fix.