not to distract you from a pure debian install, you might want to check out progeny, it's a commercial debian varient headed by Ian Mudock. I've been running it on my laptop, and it has been really stable.

I know how you feel about the whole windows thing.. I've been doing linux systems for years, and it's just been silly how bad it's gotten. after you get used to thinking like a unix user, things will just feel warm and fuzzy all over :)

oh.. btw.. http://www.progeny.com is where you want to go :)

12gig red mk2 -- 080000125