Weird, my experience has been exactly the opposite. I reinstalled ubuntu 8.10 on my Asus notebook less than 2 days ago without any of these weird things happen

Weird, my experience has been exactly the opposite. I reinstalled ubuntu 8.10 on my Asus notebook less than 2 days ago without any of these weird things happening, wifi, sound, trackpad, power management and sleep/resume all work perfectly without the need to tweak anything. Coincidentally, with Windows XP I've always had to tweak the power management so that my machine was "always on" as when I closed the lid, it would sleep and when it came back, things just did not work right.