Pacfica finally arrived from FedEx Monday afternoon. Of course, like a kid in a candy store, I had to start playing with it right away. 
openSUSE 11.1 was recently released, so I set about preparing to wipe windows to set up an openSUSE/Vista dual boot. Note that to boot from cd or dvd, you need to adjust the BIOS boot order.
Partitioning
Dell shipped pacifica with three partitions: a 41 MB "Dell Utility" partition, a 10 GB "Recovery" partition, and a 223 GB "OS" partition. While openSUSE's much maligned new expert partitioner takes some getting used to, and could use a few usability tweaks, I was able to shrink my main windows partition to make room for Linux. I was also able to set up LVM for /home, /usr, and /var. All in all, I was able to turn pacifica into a dual-boot box without having to reinstall windows, so the new partitioner passes the test, in my opinion.
