Comment 152 for bug 561802

In my experience, this type of bug is extremely uncommon with Ubuntu (I've been using it for more than 2 years now). The problem is that the Intel chips that are in the E6510 are very new, and the Linux kernel developers need to find out how they work by trial and error, because the full specs and the drivers are not released. Sometimes Dell or Intel would help a little bit, but they don't seem to care enough. So don't let this put you off, it's the hardware manufacturers, and certainly not a buggy OS, that are causing these issues.

I have a E6510 with intel gpu, and for me a plain Lucid install (iso downloaded in June or July) worked fine, except for suspend/resume, VGA output and advanced settings for the touchpad (it works fine, but you don't get multitouch).

All these issues are being solved right now. You can have a look at this bug, too: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/600453 .

Installing a new kernel from http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/drm-intel-next/current/ shouldn't be too difficult, you basically download 3 .deb packages, double-click on them and they should install automatically. When you reboot your computer, the new kernels should be selected automatically, but if they're not you should hold down shift right after the BIOS screen and then select them with the arrow keys. You can always find more detailed instructions by googling "install kernel package deb" or something like that, I think there is lots of information on the Ubuntu wiki pages.