Well, life has a funny way of working. I had planned to take more time, and be more choosy when buying a laptop, but something came up, which meant I had to get one fast.

So I plumped for the Acer TravelMate 5720, with 4GB RAM, ordered from eBuyer, who a: I've used before, and b:, seemed to be the cheapest.

And it's a good-'un.
Pretty much everything important works in Ubuntu 8.10. Graphics, sound, wireless LAN, bluetooth, webcam, and the fingerprint reader*. It's fast, got lots of RAM (for Java development), and seems sturdily built.

The only slight gotcha is that you need to use the server kernel images instead of the generic ones if you want to be able to see all the memory.

Here is the output of lspci -n:

00:00.0 0600: 8086:2a00 (rev 03)
00:02.0 0300: 8086:2a02 (rev 03)
00:02.1 0380: 8086:2a03 (rev 03)
00:1a.0 0c03: 8086:2834 (rev 04)
00:1a.1 0c03: 8086:2835 (rev 04)
00:1a.7 0c03: 8086:283a (rev 04)
00:1b.0 0403: 8086:284b (rev 04)
00:1c.0 0604: 8086:283f (rev 04)
00:1c.1 0604: 8086:2841 (rev 04)
00:1c.2 0604: 8086:2843 (rev 04)
00:1d.0 0c03: 8086:2830 (rev 04)
00:1d.1 0c03: 8086:2831 (rev 04)
00:1d.2 0c03: 8086:2832 (rev 04)
00:1d.7 0c03: 8086:2836 (rev 04)
00:1e.0 0604: 8086:2448 (rev f4)
00:1f.0 0601: 8086:2815 (rev 04)
00:1f.1 0101: 8086:2850 (rev 04)
00:1f.2 0101: 8086:2828 (rev 04)
00:1f.3 0c05: 8086:283e (rev 04)
02:00.0 0200: 14e4:1693 (rev 02)
04:00.0 0280: 8086:4229 (rev 61)
0f:06.0 0607: 104c:8039
0f:06.1 0c00: 104c:803a
0f:06.2 0180: 104c:803b
0f:06.3 0805: 104c:803c

calum@laptop:~$ sudo whoami
Scan right index finger on AuthenTec AES1610

root
calum@laptop:~$