Well a co-worker of mine convinced me to install Linux (More specifically I installed debian — of course) on my laptop (Averatec 6100), so I did. Its been relativly painless, with a few minor problems. On first boot Xorg came up just perfectly and worked, but on the following reboot I had issues. First that it set the mouse to /dev/input/mouse0. Second, I found that synaptic (touchpad drivers) required that I modprobe evdev but debian didnt configure the system to do that (put it into the list in /dev/modules).
Also I got the wireless working just fine. Had to install ndiswrapper (and also installed network-tools) along with the right drivers (I found on this list on ndiswrapper’s site). Running ndiswrapper -i driver.inf to install and ndiswrapper -l to confirm its installed. Added wlan0 to /etc/interfaces/network and bingo we’re online.
In fact, this post is comming from my new debian machine. Next up: running fakeap and netstumbler on the other machine.