How has your experience with Linux been? Any X crashes or bad wireless performance? If you have had these problems, what version of the kernel were you running?
The wireless performance and connectivity is really horrible. I blame the proprietary driver for that, tough.
Since I followed the workaround described here [0], I'm not getting any more Xorg crashes. However, I suffered from very high graphics-related latencies, which required another workaround described in [1].
The only, but very nasty, issue left are very random complete system freezes. The power button continues to work, but I have no idea where they come from.
Right now, I'm running 2.8.38 again. I tried some .39 releases, but had various issues with them. The 3.0 release candidates did either reboot immediately due to some known UEFI bug or the touch pad and keyboard did not work.
Did you end up getting EFI to work? I tried, but the efivars module wasn't creating the right sysfs devices. Then I couldn't get lilo working on GPT, so I had to reformat to MBR.
I never had anything like that in the links you gave. I had X freezes, where I could usually hit the power button once, and the computer would shutdown normally. If magic sysrq keys worked correctly, I could just use raw mode (the reboot magic combination never seemed to work). I also had many kernel oops from Divide Error, which would cause ksoftirqd to go 100% cpu until the computer froze a few minutes later. So if things seem laggy, I have a habit of checking to see if this is occurring, then I can restart normally before the crash.
All of these crashes haven't happened recently, however. The strangest thing I am seeing at the moment is Battery acpi signals, when there is no reason for why they should be triggered.
I also just ordered an atheros ar9382 to replace the wireless card. I may lose bluetooth, but I don't even have the relevant programs installed at the moment. I would say the wireless was okay while I had signal, but would go horrible when it got a little distance away.
The installation with Ubuntu Natty was as painless as it could be. Grub2 with EFI support worked right away. What distribution/kernel combination are you using?
I had a few strange kernel oopses with 2.6.39 kernels, that seemed to be SATA related. That's why I downgraded back to 2.6.38.
Could you let me know whether your wireless replacement worked or not? Right now the bad wireless connectivity is the biggest issue I'm having.
I'm running Gentoo and 2.6.39. I tried elilo, but efibootmgr wanted a different sysfs structure to what was there from the efivars module. As for grub2 efi, I followed a few online tutorials but couldn't get it working. The wireless card will take a few weeks to get here, but it will work, just a new card.
