I did a complete installation, and wiped windows from the harddisk. This laptop comes with a rescue disk, so if I really want to I can reset the computer back to the factory settings quite easy.

Firstly I downloaded the latest release of the debian installer which when I did my installation was still only at the beta release stage, but they have done such a great job that their were no problems that I could see. The new debian installer, is still a text based installer, but it works on just about any arch. I have even used it on my digital alphastation 400, over a serial console.

As the this is a very new laptop I used the 2.6 kernel and it did detect most things without any problems.

When I partitioned the disk I wiped off all the partitions and then created a 500mb root partition, which will also contain the /boot partition. The rest of the disk I turned into a lvm disk and then created the other partitions including swap in the lvm disk.

Using the lvm disk made it much easier for me to determine the sizing of my data. also this means that I can extend logical volumes on the fly with no trouble at all.