Dell Inspiron 8000 Unique Situation

[slasher_psi]

Hi,
My friend bought my Dell Inspiron 8000 from me. Now I want him to install linux and I just need to ask you all a few questions.
Basicaly, A couple of things
-Can I get the sound working and how?
-I upgraded the video card to a supposedly unsupported radeon 7500 64mb so now the ATI drivers (at least under windows) for the I8100 (which came with the 7500) wouldn't install because of the bios. So i was using the omegacorner.com drivers, which are only for windows.
-Can I get the inegrated networking going.
-Can I get pcmcia wireless going.

What he would be doing is basicaly IMing, net, word proccessing and some gaming: StarCraft, Diablo II, Deus Ex, on wine. So can I just run the video card on Xfree86 or do i need a special driver. If so is that dirver available. I am working with Ubuntu Distributions (Debian with Gnome and a few other nifty things)

[AlexK]

1. For sound, i don't know what kind of sound card the computer has, but depending on the distro that you choose, it should work.

2. Ati card will work with vesa driver, don't expect any 3D acceleration in linux (long story short, ati doesn't make any good 3d drivers for linux). And if you want to run those games in linux, best thing to do would be to get a nvidia card and take a look at cedega rather than wine.

3. For wired and wireless networking, wired should work out of box with pretty much any major distro. With wireless, you are going to have to do a bit more setting up, See this post for more info on wireless networking.