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trouble with its Wifi, one had trouble with both its CD-ROM and Wifi, and one has issues with the sound-card.

None of these are highly sophisticated H/W (imagine trouble with CD-ROM).

I would just have returned those as defective. *If it doesn't work, return it*. Your problem was most likely with the motherboard though.

But in atleast two of the cases the problem got solved with the very latest versions of GNU/Linux. The Wifi card which was not working in FC5 started functioning in Ubuntu Dapper and the latest Knoppix, while the unresponsive CD-ROM had no problems in the latest Knoppix.

It is true that geeks & hackers with some effort can fix most of these issues. I don't claim to be a geek, but I feel even those belonging to the 'uber' class would not always have the time to manually rectify their hardware problems.

After all, 'out-of-the-box' is a good thing to have, and Ubuntu has achieved it to a large extent.

Cheers, Debarshi