[LAU] new laptop redux

Greetings, fellow LAUyers, To recap: I recently purchased a Hewlett-Packard G60-125NR notebook, a machine based on an AMD Turion 2 GHz CPU, with 3G RAM, a 250G hard disk, and an on-board nVidia 8200M (essential for my work). Sound comes from an nVidia chipset based on the dreaded Intel HDA codec. My experience so far has been illuminating. I first tried to install the 64-bit versions Ubuntu 8.10 and Arch Linux, both of which froze during the installation procedure. Some research indicated that the likely culprit was the Atheros wifi driver, so I tried the brokenmodules option but still got no joy. I found reports that Mandriva and OpenSUSE 11.0 worked, and since OpenSUSE downloaded faster I gave it a whirl. The brokenmodules option seemed to do the trick, and after a while I had a new Open SUSE 11.0 (64-bit) installed on the machine. Alas, I couldn't get the official nVidia driver to work, which left me with an unsatisfactory vesa framebuffer display. A little more Googling revealed that indeed some users were enjoying Ubuntu 8.10 on this hardware, so I tried again, this time with the i386 installer. Voila, in short order I had a new Ubuntu system installed, with working 3D acceleration from the nVidia closed-soure driver. On to the audio. Intrepid doesn't create an audio group by default, so I had to do the dance to add that group and myself to its users. That got me to realtime JACK performance, though I'm still suffering excessive xruns at 17.4 ms latency (-p 256 -n 3 -r 44100). I don't plan to use that chipset as a primary audio interface anyway (I'm in the market for a USB interface now), so for the present time I'll live with it. Btw, the audio device is on IRQ 19, probably not the optimal position. I have one more permissions problem to resolve (access to /dev/nvidiactl is forbidden to the normal user) then I believe I'll have my target machine, i.e. a portable box that can run AVSynthesis (OpenGL + Csound). Btw, I've already scrapped the GNOME desktop in favor of fluxbox (of course), but I'd certainly like to hear from other Ubuntu users regarding any other recommended streamlining. For instance, I'd like to junk pulseaudio and compiz completely but I'm not sure how to do it. One question: Should I go ahead and install the UbuntuStudio packages ? I have the rt-kernel, it seems I could just go ahead and install the rest. Any reasons not to do so ? Best, dp