To check the md5 you'll need to get the md5sum program and run it from a DOS prompt. You can get it at the bottom of http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/using_md5sums.html#links" .
As for kubuntu I can't say (never used it), but my experience with Ubuntu was that if it worked with your hardware out of the box, it was quite nice, but if you had nasty evil manufacturer unsupported wireless devices (like my linksys usb ones that are the same model but have completely different chipsets) you're up a creek without a paddle, because Ubuntu does not install a lot of basic tools for you (things like make, gcc, since in their system you shouldn't need them).
As for broadcomm, you'll have to use ndiswrapper. Better chipsets to go with are Atheros (frequently works out of the box, Slax live cd picked it right up, native drivers), Ralink (had zero problems installing the native drivers for this one once, which was good since at the time I had far less experience with that sort of thing), ACX100 works well also (includes some useful shell scripts for configuring the device on bootup too, including setting up WEP encryption).
When you say your "battery" doesn't work in Suse, I assume that you actually mean something else that makes more sense, like "the ACPI battery monitor" doesn't work properly? This is likely related to a kernel compiled without ACPI support (if I had to take a guess from however many hundreds of miles away without even looking at the computer).
