Tested with Ubuntu 6.10. Everything works well. Hibernating, Standby, 3D, WLAN, even the IBM Buttons.

I have installed ubuntu Linux on my R50E and it works great here too. It's fast! The only thing I am trying to work out is that, when booting, the screen right before the log-in screen is 'garbled'. (The display AFTER the text part of bootup and before sign on dialog).

The only unsolved problem is the picture quality when using an external projector (beamer) - you either have a slightly distorted picture (some kind of weird comb effect?) or (with some extra software, named i855crt) you can have a crispy clear beamer picture without video. I use this notebook for presentations in my lectures and it is a little bit uncomfortable to switch betweeen the two modes (video/undistorted) depending on the content to be viewed.
Tested with Ubuntu 5.10/6.04/6.10 and 7.04

All the hardware and extra buttons are supported out of the box (Mandriva 2008 Spring).

Fedora 9 works with no problems whatsoever. This used to be my daughter's laptop for school but she got another because this one was "too slow." I went to the Lenovo support site and upgraded all drivers, firmware, etc. I then upgraded the HD to a 160GB 5400 rpm model because the 30GB drive was out of room with Windows. I used the Apricom EZ Upgrade kit to do this.

I downloaded and installed the firmware for the Intel BG 2200 wireless card from ATrpms.org using Windows to do the download and put it on a USB thumb drive so it would be accessible to the Linux partition. Then I installed Fedora 9 off DVD, double clicked on the wireless firmware RPM, enabled the wireless for my Belkin router and updated all the software with YUM. The laptop is acceptably fast despite having only 512MB of RAM, but I've got 2GB on order from Crucial.

For a bit over $200, I've got a dual boot laptop with good performance.

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