First point to note is the reason I bought my laptop (Quadra 141 -DVD) from Digital Networks
is that you can buy it without windows, and more importantly
the price reduction is passed on. It came with RH7.1, and they 
compiled/installed/tuned the latest kernel at the time (2.4.13).

It has a 850MHz celery and SiS630 (video/ide/modem/sound/ethernet/pcmcia/firewire).
Screen is 14.1" / 1024x768 and quality is quite good.
HD = FUJITSU MHN2200AT, DVD = TOSHIBA SD-C2402.

The latop is infact a rebadged Clevo 2700T
and bios upgrades can be got from them.

Bad points are it only has a single PCMCIA slot and no serial port.
Also the modem, video acceleration & tv-out were not supported under linux,
which is changing (see below).

The only thing I reconfigured on the system was to mount / with
the noatime option, so the hard disk was allowed to spin down,
after which the laptop was completely usable (albeit with an extra
PCMCIA modem).

Note the following is applicable to any SiS630 system,
and in particular my system has the following:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 630 Host (rev 31)
00:00.1 IDE interface: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5513 [IDE] (rev d0)
00:01.0 ISA bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 85C503/5513
00:01.1 Ethernet controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS900 10/100 Ethernet (rev 82)
00:01.2 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07)
00:01.3 USB Controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 7001 (rev 07)
00:01.4 Multimedia audio controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS PCI Audio Accelerator (rev 02)
00:01.6 Modem: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS]: Unknown device 7013 (rev a0)
00:02.0 PCI bridge: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] 5591/5592 AGP
00:0a.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI4410 PC card Cardbus Controller (rev 02)
00:0a.1 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments: Unknown device 8017 (rev 02)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Silicon Integrated Systems [SiS] SiS630 GUI Accelerator+3D (rev 31)

The laptop came with just vesa framebuffer (vga=791 passed to kernel) as specific support was
not available for the SiS630 @ time of shipping. However
Thomas Winischhofer has written excellent support now.

Note there is also SiS specific IDE (5513) support (like ATA100) available

Hmm as of April 2002 there is a (closed source) linux driver available for the built in modem written by SmartLink

More info about linux on clevo laptops is available from linux-on-laptops