A potentially annoying pair of newbie questions

These are likely to sound like silly questions, so please pause a moment whilst I don my asbestos long-johns... thanks. I also tried submitting them to a local Linux user group, and as far as I can tell, it was consigned to oblivion, so I'll try a somewhat larger audience.

I have a relatively old IBM ThinkPad - I think about 600 MHz speed - which has been pretty much relegated to providing wireless access to our stereo system. Windows XP Pro has been great about providing support for the PCMCIA card that gives USB 2.0 slots, as well as the external hard drive and the EdiMax wireless connector (basically a ZYDas-based chipset) that are plugged into the PCMCIA card.

Now, I'm interested in using Linux in place of Windows XP - all I'm doing with it is playing music, hosting music files for other computers in the home network, and some limited web browsing (weather.com and Shoutcast sites). I can see without too much trouble setting up a Linux parbreastion for dual-booting, and limiting just what is getting put onto the laptop.

Here are my questions:

1) How can I find a Live-CD linux distro that will support the hardware I mentioned above?

2) If I can't find one, how would I go about building such a Live-CD?

The reason that I'm asking these questions is because I could see a potential opportunity for people to be able to use such a Live-CD on their old laptops as an answer to Windows Media Center, crummy sound cards notwithstanding. As a last resort, I can burn an ISO of an existing distro so that my laptop's poor little 4x CD-ROM will be able to read it, and just bite the bullet and dual-boot.

Thanks for the information!

John Gardner