I want a small, light notebook with crazy long battery life for travel. I don't much care about power, the only thing I really want it for is email, research on the road (AKA – "where should I eat tonight?"), the occasional blog post, emergency bug fixes and watching DVDs. The only concern other than that relatively low barrier to entry is I want to be able to dual boot it with both Windows* and Ubuntu** with very little hassle.

So, dear internet, what should I buy and how much is this going to cost me? Cheaper= better obviously.

I just have no experience at this end of the laptop spectrum.

*just in case I run into some barbaric hotel network or something- "Signing up for mega-yo-yo.net requires Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher"

**so that I can be productive without having to pirate or outfit a second machine with $$ software.

Plus I just like having a Linux machine around the house. They're fun to play with and useful for testing sites that need broad support.