Debian purists will have my hide for this but ... you might try Knoppix. The CD (you can download the image and burn your own) comes with must everything. It nicely detects you hardware and gets you up an running. You can then do a hard-disk installation. Now you have (sort of) a Debian installation. Using the normal Debian upgrades, you will be a member of the club. Much easier than plodding through manually. You may still need to set up alsa yourself if the sound stuff is not correctly identified. But still much easier. Knoppix 3.3 is a Woody based (stable plus) installation on a 2.42 kernel. Knoppix 3.4 is 2.6 kernel based.