Well, having finally received the remains of my furniture and clothes - none 
of the tools I sent, and the furniture badly damaged in the eleven weeks it 
took Allied to get it here - I started building up a computer for an 
entertainment center.  I used an old Compaq Deskpro 6400 - 400MHz PII, 128M 
of Ram and I think a 4-6G HD.  I pulled the stock AGP card and installed a 
PCI All-In-Wonder 128 and a good CD-R.

Since I didn't ship a monitor (not that it would have survived Allied's 
handling), the plan is to use the video-out and the TV.  This came up in 
black-and-white from the old NT4 installation on the disk, so I booted to the 
CD for Mandrake 9.1.

The install went reasonably quickly, but niether detected nor configured the 
on-board sound card nor the video card.  The video detected as a Rage 128, 
and was still in B&W during the install.  Changing to the "All-In-Wonder" 
resulted in a black screen on testing X, and the sound remains undetected.

So far not so good.  This is older hardware, brand name and well known, with 
drivers pretty common for Windows.  It should be easier than this.