The Dell m1330 is the new hotness, and somehow I got my claws on one. I've had a couple of issues with it starting out, so I'll chronicle them here. I'll try and flesh this out more as I go along.
There's also a really helpful m1330 page at http://intr.overt.org/blog/?page_id=56. There's another one in the Ubuntu Wiki.
Booting to the Feisty liveCD. This didn't work so well, as the SATA controller is apparently by default in AHCI mode (although switching to ATA mode didn't help either). I used F6 to get to "other options" and appended "all_generic_ide" to the kernel line (I also left out quiet and splash, who needs it). If you do this to the "safe graphics mode line" instead of the "start or install ubuntu" line, you don't need to worry about the next point.
LiveCD nv driver for X doesn't work, the X server gives a cryptic error about "screens found, but none have a usable configuration". I let X bomb out and went and changed the video driver in /etc/X11/xorg.conf from "nv" to "vesa". After that, just running startx from the commandline was sufficient to get X going.
The feisty install went w/o incident, I used the partition tool that came with it, and although vista needed a filesystem check after, it booted up ok. The feisty installer made a grub entry for Windows XP embedded, which I guess is the media direct partition, and that does not work from grub, but the media direct button (the house button) starts that up ok, for what that's worth, but I don't really expect to use mediadirect all that often.
the stock tg3 driver for wired network doesn't appear to work with the installed feisty, or with the livecd. I had to get a set of dell tg3-dkms drivers and install those packages.
The packages are available from dell or in tg3_dell_dkms.tar.gz. I believe these are from an inspiron 1420 user, YMMV.
I unpacked the files and put them on a USB disk, then used dpkg to install:
gawk
modutils
dkms
tg3-dkms
after modprobe -r tg3; modprobe tg3, everything seems to work swimmingly, unless you want to reboot the machine and have it working again. Running dpkg-reconfigure --all seemed to clear up the issue, as well as allowing configuration of every damn thing on the system.
wireless - I got the 4965 wireless, a bit of a bad decision, since the iwlwifi stuff depends on a kernel that won't be available until gutsy, which comes out a month from now. I tried using gutsy kernels, tribe cd's, and finally broke down and made use of a usb wireless device (belkin fd7050, which uses zd1211rw and required no more configuration than restarting /etc/init.d/networking, not bad for $40). I'll start using the internal intel stuff in a month when gutsy shows up.
nvidia video card - I had problems w/ the ubuntu stock nvidia module, the module loaded, but X gave an error when it tried to start. Downloading the nvidia.com module worked fine and nvidia-settings is a really nice X configuration tool. I needed to go remove linux-restricted-modules-(kernelversion) and reinstall the nvidia.com driver in order for it to work, there was a conflict.
webcam - linux-uvc apparently supports this, I got the drivers from http://linux-uvc.berlios.de. The instructions in the module (I grabbed latest svn code) were pretty much sufficient to get me going, although ekiga hasn't worked with it every single time, if it bombs on starting, it seems to work if I run ekiga again with no problems.
sound Setting
options snd-hda-intel model=5stack
in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base made sound work fine.
