(But) I can’t take my ubuntu off of you! 
This post is the description of my adventures during and after the buying of the laptop. Maybe my findings could be useful to someone else.
For quite some month I was looking online to identify a new laptop to buy. One day I went to a shop and end up with the choice between a Lenovo X301 and a Sony Vaio Z.
I was more impressed by the Sony, so I bought the super new Vaio VPCZ11Z9E.
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[singlepic id=391 w=320 h=240 float=none]
I wanted to buy it without the Redmond closed source operating system but unfortunately there was nothing to do with the shop guy. They sell it with that OS. Period.
One more requirement for me was to have OS, manuals, keyboard and everything else in English. Although at the moment I’m based in Germany, I’m not German.
Unfortunately it turned out that even the software to initialize my laptop (OS installation, drivers, etc.) is in German (of course) but thanks to their kindness they provided me an “English” version of the OS. I double quoted English because they told me that they have an utility that simply translate the German text to English (?). Unfortunately what comes before the OS loading is still in German.
Edit: I took the laptop once again at the shop and they put everything in English, even the recovery partition. Hurra’!
I thought to put Ubuntu Lucid Lynx into an usb key and play with it for a while. Then, after solving at least the most important issue, I would install it on the HD.
To create the Ubuntu bootable usb key, I used Universal USB Installer with the useful Persistence feature.
Findings:
touchpad not working-> solved!- brightness keys not working
- ambient light sensor not working
Touchpad not working
Solving the touchpad issue was easy.
A simple search on internet revealed that it’s enough to simply insert in the kernel parameter:
i8042.nopnp
To be continued