My employer issued a shiny brand-new Dell Latitude D600. Here, I'm listing any issues I had with this laptop.
To play DVD's, I use Xine. I run RedHat Enterprise Linux AS release 3, so I downloaded the RPMs by Miquel Freitas. For DVD playing, Xine apparently looks at /dev/dvd, so I had to type as root: ln -s /dev/hdc /dev/dvd.
Of course at that moment, I had the floppy drive in the drive bay, so when I swapped it for the DVD drive, I used this idectl script. As root, save it in /sbin, do chmod 755 idectl on it and type idectl 1 on.
Nowadays I'm using a dualmonitor setup, i.e. Xinerama. I work on my laptop, but behind the laptop (1280x1024) I've set up an extra 17" screen. This screen shows the main JDeveloper screen while my laptop its screen (1400x1200) shows output and debugging screens, and some terminals, browsers etc. as well. Here is a screenshot. This is working so smoothly that I don't think I want to work with a single screen in the future. People with the same laptop (a Dell Latitude D600) can use my XF86Config. Be careful with this, though; I've seen a damaged laptop screen because of (suspected) wrong settings.
The Dell D600 its harddisk is located right under the left hand palm area. Soon after the laptop is turned on, this makes working in my opinion very uncomfortable. Here and here are threads on the Dell Community Forum highlighting the problems. I got around this by using a 2.6.6 kernel and before that, by patching the kernel with this patch and the included script in the documentation directory. Much better!!
Another solution would be to remove the harddisk and put it in the removable bay where the CD/DVD is located. There are modules for that, but even on Ebay they're quite expensive, see this search.
I used to run a custom 2.6 kernel, 2.6.0-test6. On RedHat 9, this gives a compilation error when using the drivers from Linuxant. I got it running by doing the following: