In short, (nearly, see below) everything worked out of the box. I used the netinst rc1 cd (I left the predesktop area intact for some odd reason; I didn't try booting to windoze). Sarge has all the necessary packages to get everything except the Atheros 802.11a/b/g card working (and the necessary "madwifi" driver can be downloaded form sourceforge). I don't have any bluetooth gadgets so I wasn't able to field test the bluetooth stack but the modules load. USB, PCMCIA, modem, etc. all seem to work.
Both ACPI (with the most recent patch on 2.6.81) and APM suspend and in the case of ACPI hibernate (I didn't try installing the APM bios hiberation stuff). I used the XFree86 4.3.0 radeon driver, not the ATI driver. The one problem I am having is quite odd: I find that remote sessions through a ssh tunnel hang intermittently after a few kilobytes. My old laptop (a Sony Vaio) also running Sarge with the same setup and wirelessly attached to the same router but kernel 2.6.7 works fine. Other network connections seem to work during an episode of hanging. If I am patient, most often a future ssh connection will work (and then continue to work until terminated). Does anybody have a clue? I'm stuck on this one. --Martin
