• Dell Inspiron 6000 with ATI X300 128MB graphics card
• Intel Centrino with Intel Pentium M 1.5GHz CPU
• 1GB DDR2 memory
• 60GB SATA hard disk drive
• DVD-RW drive
• 15.4” WSXGA+ screen (1680 x 1050)
• Bluetooth
• Wi-fi
• SD card reader

The only part of the PC that isn't supported by Linux yet is the built-in SD/MMC card reader, so for now I use my USB memory reader to fill in this function.

Everything else works out of the box with Ubuntu, even the native resolution of the display, though I did upgrade to the latest ATI drivers for 3D acceleration. The display and graphics on this laptop are fantastic, I am still impressed with its gaming performance. Yes, games such as Unreal Tournament 2003/2004 work under Linux (check the CD/DVD for the Linux installer!) And there are plenty of other free and commercial games that are very good.

If you have specific Windows games you wish to play, you can use WineX. This allows DirectX Windows games to run within a Linux OpenGL environment. It's not an emulator as such, they have just rewritten everything the game requires (Windows APIs) natively in Linux. Impressive stuff! The same has been done to run normal Windows applications through the Crossover Office and WINE projects. You can run Microsoft Office this way, though M$ Office is a �400 more expensive solution than the excellent (and free of course) OpenOffice.org suite, which is compatible with Office files anyway.

 
Update: 10 February 2006

Yesterday's upgrade to the kernel I'm using in Ubuntu Linux (Dapper pre-release) is version 2.6.15-15-686 and it supports the SD card reader! For the first time the 32MB MMC card I had left in the drive automatically appeared on my desktop. So now I consider my Dell Inspiron 6000, 100 per cent compatible with Ubuntu Linux.