The computer upgrade: light at the end of the tunnel, must be an oncoming train

After having a lot of trouble with Kubuntu I finally said "fuck it" and installed Debian testing amd64, and lo and behold, it works. It uses vesa driver for the graphics and somehow fails to use any resolution over 1280x1024, but otherwise the graphics are fine. It could not find the motherboard's integrated ethernet card, but I installed another one from my ethernet card collection, and it's a mere 10/100, but it works. The sound still does not work - will try to tweak it tonight or, failing that, will install my old sound card which is so ancient that cavemen used to beat each other over the head with it when no clubs were available.

Tried to install some drivers from nVidia site, but they turned out to be evil, failed to unstall and disapproved of every fucking kernel source in the known universe.