[LBo] Hardware drivers

[Jisao]

I have a new 64 bit motherboard with a nvidia chipset. It has onboard 
network card, onboard sound and onboard Geforce 6100 graphic card.

My network doesn't work properly, my sound either, and my video display 
is querky.  The problems vary depending on what distribution and what 
version I use.

My main question is, before I start digging into "debugging" all this, 
do we have to install drivers in Linux for Linux to recognize hardware?  
To install some other OS, I had to install drivers for any of these to 
work.  I was wondering if it is the same for Linux. If one have very 
recent hardware, is it possible that it is not detected by Linux because 
of lack of a proper driver?

I am not too sure of how things work with Linux in that regard.

Jisao