After some intensive testing the day before, I finally came around and installed Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop.
- Once again, with encrypted hard drive and this time no hassle: the installer works like a charm and no manual setup necessary.
- The intel driver and the X-server have finally matured enough that I can attach/detach external monitors on the fly (using xrandr 1.2 under the hood), though TV-Out is still not working for my with my Intel GM965 chipset.
- Sound works out of the box, without having to re-install another ALSA version whenever a kernel update happened (after some fiddling, Skype works as well; thanks to this thread, Part C).
- Unfortunately, kpilot is no longer available. But jpilot does the trick as well.
All in all, a very polished distribution and Nautilus, Gnome‘s file browser, finally got tabs!!!