Use the AMD64 variant of Ubuntu 9.10 and install that. After that, here are steps to take to cure various problems that are present after a “vanilla” Ubuntu 9.10 amd64 installation:

Black screen after resume

This problem with the computer’s NVidia Quadro NVS 140m graphics card is reported to be due to using the open source “nv” graphics driver kernel module, and to be cured by installing the proprietary “nvidia” graphics driver kernel module. See for example: “On an R61 running Fedora Core 9, the nv driver fails to turn the backlight on after resuming from a suspend to RAM. I fixed this by using the proprietary NVIDIA Linux drivers (v177.82)” [source].

So the solution would simply be to install the newest nvidia driver, that would mean nvidia-kernel-source-185 as of this writing. However there is an additional issue: it seems that when installing nvidia-185-kernel-source, the post-install script misses to create an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Then, the X server will startup with an internal default configuration that will apparently not use the nvidia proprietary driver even if the corresponding kernel module is installed. Even worse, after installing the nvidia-173-kernel-source package there is an issue that the LCD stays blank (though backlight is on) in every second system startup. And even worse, installing the version 173 package changes the font dpi settings so that fonts get really huge and render most applications unusable. Note that this problem is also cured with the below method.

Therefore the full solution is this:

user@computer:# sudo apt-get install nvidia-185-kernel-source
user@computer:# nvidia-xconfig # (Will create a fitting /etc/X11/xorg.conf which uses also correct font settings.)

Then start X. You will note, in comparison with the default built-in X server configuration: more color depth on the display (though even before it seemed that external monitors already had that deep color depth), sound is working now incl. volume changing keys, suspend-to-RAM and resume works without the “black screen” issue, and accelerated graphics works (like transparency and other effects in KDE). Note that Fn+F4 for suspend-to-RAM does not yet work, instead call it from the menu.

You can further tune settings if you want by starting “gksudo nvidia-settings” within X.

No sound

After the initial installation, the equilizer of audacious2 indicates that it plays, but there is no sound output, neither at the speakers nor the headphones. However when starting “xmms2 play” and then doing a suspend-to-RAM / resume cycle, sound starts to play audibly on resume (but then the display stays black currently; also, the volume control buttons would not work). All these issues went away automatically after following the above instructions for the “black screen after resume” issue.