Microsoft has gotten so larcenous with what they charge for a full version of Windows. It doesn't take a math major to figure out that MS is charging personal consumers way more for Windows OS than their cobbled together antiquated OS is worth. In light of that, I played around a bit with a few Linux distros [distributions] two or three years ago. But, I eventually had to give up that dream for the same reason you mentioned --- hardware compatibility which, specifically, means the lack of device drivers for Linux. All hardware comes with Windows drivers, and a lot comes with MAC drivers, but the support for other OSes is extremely limited. If some Linux hacker has not written a pseudo-generic driver that will recognize your hardware, and CRU Dataports has not written linux device drivers, you are probably out of luck.
I just took a quick look at CRU's support page, but the only driver I found there was for Win98. For everybody else, they say go to MS or Apple's web site for USB drivers. Not a good sign for you, my friend.
CRU-DataPort :: Technical Support - Downloads