If you plan on doing any surface rendering (which is very likely, at
some point), get an nVidia graphics card, with at least 64M of memory.
And get at least 1 Gig of RAM for the CPU.
The reason for going with nVidia is that they provide drivers for Linux.
For most applications, you won't care about that. But if you run surface
rendering software, like SUMA, those drivers will make a huge difference.
Do you plan to install Linux yourself, or will you buy a computer that has
it pre-installed? There are many companies that will pre-install RedHat 9
for you, if you wish (like ASL, www.aslab.com).
- rick