Hi,
Hi, I too have written a report on a similar hardware. Except I had a PATA drive instead of a SATA. I have a PATA DVD RW too. Anyway, I have the i386 install. It is stable. No issues till now. I have Xen virtualization enabled as well. The only difference between our installation methods is I guess I installed the distro without Xen virtualization and then used the system-config-packages to add Xen and the Xen kernel. The system was stable all throughout. 2.6.18-SMP kernel updated to 2.6.19-SMP and 2.6.18-Xen updated to 2.6.19-Xen.
I have created a wiki entry based on my experience on the ilug-bom site in the HOWTO section as per some suggestions I received. Maybe you could also update the wiki with your experiences.
Regards, Rajesh