Are all drivers good?
If you have physical access, why not boot the Dell Inspiron M501R to an openSUSE-11.4 liveCD (try both the GNome liveCD and the KDE liveCD). If you manage to get it running with the liveCD, then you could run the commands from a terminal:
/sbin/lspci -nnk | less
and take a pix of the output with a digital camera and post it here:
lsusb
and take a pix of the output with a digital camera and post it here.
The information on Inspiron M501R Laptop Details | Dell India is pretty slim, and other than read ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 550v 1GB for graphics and Standard Dell Wireless 1501 802.11 b/g/n Half Mini Card for wireless, its pretty difficult for any to draw any conclusions (unless they have the same laptop).
Dell also have a reasonable chat channel, and you could always chat with their salespeople on their chat channel and get their view wrt GNU/Linux compatibility.
I’ve read “the AMD ATI Mobility Radeon HD 550v is based on the same chip as the old Mobility Radeon HD 4650 but features slightly slower clock rates” so if GNU/Linux works with Radeon HD4650 then there is a reasonable chance it will work with HD 550v. Of course there is a LOT more to this than just graphics hardware so IMHO you should try to follow my previous recommendation.