I'm about to go away on holiday.
So this week I bought a small, light, inexpensive machine -- a Samsung N150.
I decided (like you do) that it should dual-boot the shipped OS (Windows 7) and Linux.
Once I'd got past the stupidity of Samsung shipping the unit with four primary partitions on the hard disk (re-do the last partition as a logical drive in an extended partition) and the entirely reasonable fact that it didn't have a CD (using the Universal USB installer from pendrivelinux.com), I've got Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit Linux installed and working just fine.
Except that there's no wireless networking under Linux.
With the generic 2.6.32-23.37 kernel's standard module "r8192_pci" it recognises the device, but I can't connect to the access point.
With ndiswrapper and the 32- or 64-bit XP drivers, it doesn't even recognise the device.
So it looks like it's either wired networking on Linux, or back to Windows 7 for me -- unless I can google up a fix that actually works, or they fix the native driver in a subsequent kernel.
Harumph.