Here is my funny little story about linux hardware support. My friend Sam and I both bought brand new sound blaster sound cards about 6 months ago and assumed we would have no problem getting them to work with Mandrake 9.0. Anyway after a lot of problems, neither of us had sound. Well I got pissed and took the card back, and bought the cheapest, oldest sound card they had at the store ($5). It was so old that it had drivers for MS-Dos 5 and Windows 3.1 included. Anyway I installed it and it works flawlessly. It seems sometimes the older the hardware is, the more likely it will work well with linux.