The laptop is a desktop replacement 18.4" Acer with intel chipset (4500HD graphics etc.) bought from Amazon (free shipping and no tax! Looks like it's not available anymore, probably discontinued) 6 months ago. The netbook is a Dell mini 10v from Dell outlet on one of its 15% off offers.

The Acer has an HDMI output. I connected it to my 24" 1920x1200 Samsung and point and clicked the monitor applet on the gnome panel and viola, dual monitor support at full resolution without having to fiddle xorg.conf! Point and clicked to configure the wifi on both machines without any problems. Man, I was ecstatic, probably due to the low expectation from my Gentoo experience -- I was expecting to vi a few things to make them work :)

To be honest, I did have to add a fixmtrr.sh to gdm PostLogin and a line (MigrationHeuristic greedy) to xorg.conf to fix the intel video performance regression in Jaunty on both machines, when I felt the desktop effect was a bit sluggish. Now the desktop animations are smooth as butter even on the netbook.

I did choose to install 32-bit Ubuntu with server kernel (to get PAE in Jaunty) to take advantage of the full 4GB RAM, instead of 64-bit because flash and a few other things don't work as well as in 32-bit.