My first linux "build" (?)

Well most of what you posted can be done... but mounting on your dash and playing WoW? Heh where you live so I can make sure I don't drive around there?

Anyways the thing with what you want is going to be setting it up. I can't think of any distro intended specifically for that, but take a look at distrowatch and see what you can find. Otherwise there will be a bit of customization work involved.

Ill wait a bit and see if anoyne makes any suggestions before I post details on customization though The primary problem you might run into is the fact it is a Sony machine and they tend to be very proprietary.

Seablade

eveything is very doable. for your specific use gentoo would be a great way to go, however factoring in long compile times and the OPs n00bness factor Arch or even Debian might be better alternatives. Of course go with a skinny config which includes Fluxbox, Slim, and Thunar at the base. Mounting of media is to be done through thunar-volman. Email through sypheed-claws, FF is fine for browser. This should minimize the used hard drive space and make it run faster on low-ram system. Because the system is a Sony though, I am sure some hardware configuration hell is in the works.

Well, how you gonna make it all fit in your car is up to you. The webcam...if you get one of those that clip on to the top of the LCD, just clip it on backwards, assuming your laptop is mounted high enough where the top of the lcd is above the dashboard.

But back on topic.

As I a said earlier, you will want to go with a lighter configuration. There are 3 benefits to this. Less used up hdd space for installing the OS (leaving more room for files), faster boot time, and generally faster performance (and less RAM use). For best results, I highly recommend Arch Linux because it is known to be fast and reasonably straight forward to configure. Once you setup the base install (burn iso, install, reboot), from there you will need to install fluxbox and xorg to get a gui (the base install is text mode only). From that point you should install all the applications you feel you'll need. And then, once we know there are no major complications, we can start working on tweaking your system to be faster (hint: background all the daemons at boot) and getting all your special needs going.

Certainly can do this, and it is common on Maemo tablets(n800, n810, n770). However I don't have personal experience with it to be able to help you out much. As long as your USB/Bluetooth is supported, there is a strong chance the GPS unit is I believe.

If it can run Java, it can run OpenOffice.

Lumping these two together. Yes this is certainly possible. If you are looking for in the car, take a good look at interfaces, what works on the desktop may not work so well while driving a car, you want something well suited to a touchscreen. On the Maemo based n-Series tablets, Canola tends to do quite well, however I believe Canola still has a few closed source components (Free as in beer) and likely won't run on your machine as it is compiled for ARM instead of x86 which is what I assume your machine runs. But it is a good example of things to lok for in an interface, you want something that can be easily accessed via a finger on a touchscreen, and not take long to get where you want(To much attention on your playback, not enough on the road).

Very Likely.

Wine is your friend. As long as it is a x86 computer it is doable.

Likely supported, but again dealing with Sony so who knows.

Surprisingly this is also likely supported, though you may need to edit a few files by hand for your login info. Make sure the ones containing your password is NOT publicly accessible as a result.

In general it will either be supported natively or via ndiawrapper. Considering this is Sony, unfortunately this probably means ndiswrapper.

Xorg is the graphical subsystem things like KDE use to draw windows etc. It is the very low level access to your hardware, so think along the lines of drivers etc, though it is a bit more than that. KDE, Gnome, e17, XFCE, etc. all are window managers or desktop environments that run on top of XOrg and all require it to run.

Given your requirements, I think it would be worth it for you to stat digging into Linux in a deeper way than you have been. Start going through Gentoo Installs, learn about SSH and how to access your tablet through it. Gentoo may take a while, but it is great for customizing your experience, and I would strongly suggest you take your time and plan out just what you want your experience to be like and customize it based off that. It will take a while to do right, but once you do it right, install it, make an image of your install elsewhere so you can easily re-install in a fraction of the time, and run with it.

Seablade

Questions are a good thing, feel free to ask them. Most of us here have done Gentoo at one point or another, a few of us still do it on a regular basis, so if you do go that route let me know.

Seablade

Well, that really depends. If you install Gentoo w/ KDE or Gnome, and then install a good load of software, as well as have an all-inclusive mega huge kernel then yes, it will easily take over a gig. However, if you do something along the lines of Fluxbox for your WM/DE and then lighter apps (such as Thunar instead of Nautilus or Sypheed instead of Thunderbird) and also keep your kernel very specific to your hardware, then you will come in at well under 1gb, perhaps in the 500mb range. Will run faster too since those programs have lower ram/cpu requirements.

That said, Gentoo is a good learning experience. Hell, I've done it maybe 5 or 6 times already with limited success. I don't know if its worth it though. You might as well go with Debian (just straight debian) or Arch for a similar crash course w/o having to wait for hours to compile stuff from source.

leaving computer mumbo jumbo aside, compiling basically means taking source code and making an executable out of it.

gentoo makes the process rather simple through their portage package manager. it also makes (some forms of) editing fairly simple (via USE flags...see gentoo wiki for more info). Thats the thing with gentoo. how it installs packages is it downloads the source code, then makes some changes based on your inputs (including USE tags) and builds an executable to fit what you asked for. Other distro's package managers actually download a type of archive package like .deb or .rpm (kinda like a .exe or .msi in windows) and then unzip it and toss all the files in the correct directories (kinda like the windows installer moves the program to Program Files and if needed some dlls to teh windows folder) so all thats left to do is to run the program. These binary installations are significantly faster than source, but are not at all flexible.

damn USE flags... always messed those up lol

but abf pretty much summed it up well. some people post the USE flags they use for certain laptops. maybe you can try googling it.