That's great, when you have spent 2 months choosing the most performant and most generic laptop for a given price, and you then realize that no Linux will work directly on it and that under Windows there are some latency problems with the HDSP because ACPI has put it on the same IRQ number as many other devices. Manufacturers give very few information about their laptops, and so do internet forums and lists (I asked 4 different forums about HDSP audio laptop recommendations and got no anwser, besides "don't buy a Sony Vaio, it's too proprietary").
I agree with you, and when I have time I configurate and install my own linux distribution for making live music at 96000 kHz / 24 bit with no latency.
Selon Jamie Bullock jamie@postlude.co.uk:
I don't think there's going to be a quick fix. I've just been installing Gentoo on an Acer travelmate, and in addition to the buggy DSDT, there are several kernel options that don't work together like PCMCIA support at boot and ACPI. Unless you are very lucky, I think you will have to either do what Frank says and lose some features via the kernel boot time flags, or compile your own kernel.
Have you checked if anyone has done it before on http://www.linux- laptop.net/?
-- Regards,
Jamie