I recently purchased the most excellent ENP611 by Enpower which is a rebranded laptop sold by PC Club. The reason I purchased it was because it proved to be highly Linux-compatible, and because PC Club has a policy of not charging you for an OS that you don't intend to use. If you happen to live near one, I highly recommend stopping in. Unfortunately, you cannot get the same discount if you order online.
But enough about that. The very first thing I did upon getting this lovely new toy home was to install Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger). Surprisingly, just about everything works fantastically well out of the box. The only unsupported part is the SD media reader, and suspend and hibernation don't work particularly well out of the box.
By default, closing the lid causes the display to blank and touching the power button causes the machine to shut down. Having the lid blank the display is quite useful, but having the power button turn the machine off isn't. It makes more sense to have it cause the machine to enter hibernation mode.
Initially, I tried to have the power button cause the laptop to enter ACPI S3 mode (suspend to RAM) but S3 mode causes the laptop to hang upon resume, so the only real way to suspend is mode S4 (suspend to disk). Ubuntu has swsusp set up by default, so there's very little configuration to be done.
In order to make hibernation work, you must edit two files and make them look as follows:
Presto! Touching the power button should now cause your display to fade, and the laptop to power off. When you power it back on, the kernel should automatically restore your system as it was.
You may have some trouble getting wireless working initially. The button just to the right of the power button turns on and off the wireless card's radio in hardware, so you may need to touch it to turn the radio on. You can confirm the radio's status in a terminal with the iwconfig(8) command. Unfortunately, the LED light just below the button does not work in Linux.
The built in trackpad is a rather nice Synaptics unit, and it should be supported by default with Ubuntu, including the up and down scroll area ont the right hand side. You can actually middle and right click using tap-to-click. If you tap with two fingers, you'll middle click. If you tap with three fingers, you'll right click. I love this feature.
Don't forget to install the nvidia-glx package from the Universe repository and run the command "sudo nvidia-glx-config enable" to get accelerated 3D video. If you only care about 2D, you can skip this step.