Dell Latitude Expertise Needed

Dell Latitude D505, with 14.1" screen (1024x768 max), Broadcom 4306 (rev 3) wifi chipset. I have access to an Atheros-chipped (5212) PCMCIA card and an rt73-based USB. I've gotten the last item to work in Etch on an ancient Gateway laptop, so it can be done (used SerialMonkey driver).

I'm doing my homework because previous sallies failed miserably. I'm committed to doing this if I can get some expert assistance. For now, I'm forced to run XP to get my work done -- yech! Previous efforts:

FreeBSD -- ACPI may never work, and wireless is very iffy. Everything else is just dandy.
Kubuntu 7.10 -- ACPI was a wreck, and none of my wireless items worked properly, nor for more than a few minutes at a time. There's a bug requiring reboot when any wifi dies.
CentOS 4.5 -- Came the closest to working, but only in that I found a script for lid_close to S2 suspension. The USB wifi worked just barely because the back-ported kernel patches were mismatched.

Net result: I've gone to the trouble of rolling back the BIOS from A11 to A09 just to be sure I'm ready. It was noted as an issue on two or three forums.

Issues:

1. Wireless: I'm willing to use Ndiswrapper for the onboard Broadcom, but so far it hasn't worked anywhere else. Perhaps I bungled, but I tend to doubt it. If the Atheros card will work with WPA, I'll be just as happy. I'll have all-day access to wired ethernet for a week to get this up to speed.

2. ACPI: This is probably the biggest issue. I really rely on suspend-to-RAM and hibernate. I'm willing to run through debugging if I can get help scripting these two. I'm willing to build the suspend2 module. I am also quite content suspending from the console. I love the console, and use it often by itself.

3. Framebuffer: Which brings up the framebuffer issue -- this is an Intel chipset. I'm quite willing to build a kernel with the intelfb compiled in, but I've never done a Linux kernel. I'll need some expert guidance, because if I'm going to go to that much trouble, I'll want to whittle out the fat. We'll save that for later, though. I really need the first two items as this is my work machine, my only machine.

I've run Etch on a desktop or two, love it, and will do the work, but not if I can't get expert guidance. I've tried it my way and with Google, and I'm not interesting in another beating. Once we're done, I won't run away, but stay to contribute in areas where I feel competent.