Linux is actually very HW compatible ... for example my Creative soundcard just burned (the fucking piece of shit !!!) and I went out and bough a decent but cheap one. I was doubting it would work straight off with Linux, but it did ! Maybe I was just lucky ? So far Linux has succesfully detected any hardware I've thrown at it. (Note that the "not recognizing my laptop's HDD" bit was due to the 2.4 kernel being loaded by Debian based systems by default ... the 2.6 kernels support it just fine) :thumbup: