OK, I think it will work just fine, only 16 meg might be a little small for some of those slick Window Managers (ie. Gnome or KDE2). As always a modem can give troubles, but other people on this forum know these things better than I.
I think you'll have to load the opl3sa2 module into your kernel after booting, but maybe there are tools for that in your disto. What is it btw?. If you want to use PCMCIA you have to have a disto with this enabled (kernel 2.2.18 and higher, and some older patched ones). These days linux is quite easy on laptops. You have to know there's a page dedicated to the subject.
http://www.linux.org/hardware/laptop.html
Good luck
Matthieu