Am getting ready to start doing the bus commute again, and I'd really like to take advantage of my TX1200 (HP laptop, 2 gigs RAM, Touchscreen, etc). I'm worried about the HD from all the bumping around on a bus, and so am wondering if I can configure it to boot and run from a 16 gig SDHC card in the internal card reader? If not, is there someway to setup a small USB drive to boot from one of the USB ports, and then have it run Linux off the SD card?

If I do all that, will the touchscreen and the rotate button still work? Will I be able to tether my laptop to my AT&T Samsung Sync (A707) using bluetooth or my T-Mobile Dash (HTC) using a USB cable?

Thanks in advance for your help. Your assistance may help get a couple programs written, and will help me to save a few emissions compared to driving the car

OK, turns out that the system DOES see the internal card reader slot as a bootable USB drive. So have installed Ubu 8.04.1 to the SD Card. Select the USB drive for boot, and Grub comes up to the boot menu just fine.

But, when I then tell it to boot into Ubuntu, it gives me an error that it can't load that partition. When I look at the boot script, step 1 is:
root (hd1, 0)

I've tried changing that to:
root (hd0, 0)

and then it just gives me a blinking cursor in the top left of the screen.

Any ideas?

OK, the trick was to change the first line to:
root (hd0,0)

and then wait about 60 seconds. It then brings up the Ubuntu system quite nicely. Now I have the rather more "mundane" issue of getting Ubuntu to recognize my Broadcom 802.11 a/b/g wireless card. Would I be able to avoid doing the whole ndiswrapper thing if I went to Ibex instead of doing this with Heron? It's going to be a pain to have to find/buy a cable so I can plug into my router just for this...

Or is there another distribution that will "just work" with the tx1200?