Help on buying a Linux friendly PC
 

Hello, I was wondering if anyone could help me with this.

I am planning on buying 2 new computers. I would like to have them built on specification, and, since I am using Linux (Mandrake 9.2 at the moment) more and more, it would be nice to have them built with some consideration for Linux needs.
I would appreciate if anyone could post some possible set of specifications (something feasible of course!), so that I could have an idea of what to ask for when having a Linux friendly system built.
My requirements are pretty much as follow:
The two PC would be connected to the existing network, with my Mac and Windows machines. They will be just workstations, so nothing fancy like production web servers or mySQL servers would go on them.
Basically they will be used to get stuff from the Windows 2k server and work on it (i am doing this no probs with Samba already). The systems will also be dual boot, as some of the software we have is not compatible with Wine at all, so there is need for Windows.
What else? Oh yes each will have two screens!

Thanks in advance for your help.

Well, I know Mandrake is very friendly to just about any recent hardware (with a few exceptions). I think the only thing that will catch you will be the dual head video card support. I think you are fairly much, stuck with Matrox dual-heads. I also know that a third party can support the Appian dual head cards too, but that costs money.

As for me, I just got a dirt cheap old system (PII-400) for $80 (inc. shipping). Put Linux (Fedora) on that. No problems. Great for a test/play system, file/print server, etc.

Try looking at that LQ hcl

I am using Mandrake on two systems at the mo, my Sony Vaio PCG-FX501, where it works great, and an old IBM Aptiva 2140-L45, which I use for testing new things whenever I can.
Frankly I would like to buy something where I can work on rather than test. Although my laptop gives me lots of satisfaction, I need something bigger, meaner and... clunkier ;)

I actually went on the Mandrake website before installing it on both machines to see if any trouble would come up before hand, and also did some research base on what are the usual "troublemakers" when installing Linux.
I was not really overjoyed by the list itself, as the disclaimer says, the type of configurations you might have are many, and therefore what works for you may not work for me.
That is why I was hoping for "real life" working systems as opposed to hcls.