Many thanks to Stephan Müller, Matthew Brett and David Dawes for their help with the CRT problem, which unfortunately has not yet been solved. Stephan Müller's page http://www.chronox.de/x40_linux/linux_on_x40.html was a great resource.
Overall I am quite happy with the machine. It's nice and light, reasonably powerful; APM, wireless and ethernet work fine, and apparently it is able to go for 5 hours on the battery. I will only mention the problem components in the rest of this report. If you know of some fixes for these problems, please let me know!
-- Jim Cline, jcline at physics dot mcgill dot ca