I want to build a deticated linux box, i have some cash leftover from my recently built gaming rig, i know that i could just dual boot whichever distro i want off that pc, but i figure a whole new comptuer is better then taking another chunk out of my HDD, plus i already have a distro or two on my main pc.

After alot of searching ive decided to get a Via Epia-EN15000G, its relatively quiet, cheap, very low power requirments (Less then 70w under load.), and its an m-atx board, so the pc will have a fairly small footprint. I want to know if it will be powerful enough to run linux fairly smoothly, im not going to be doing any gaming or cpu intensive work (Thats what my main rig i for!) it'll mainly just be for web browsing, email, stuff like that, and it will act as a backup box incase my main PC goes down. I was thinking about installig Ubuntu, SUSE, or Gentoo, but if those are too intensive a distro like damn small or puppy would be ok as well.

1.5GHz? Up to a gig of RAM? IDE and SATA? I should think so! This board could outperform my current Ubuntu install on my IBM T40 by some margin! Although, there seems to be some concern over just how quick the 1.5GHz actually is: http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/195/6, given VIA's previous offerings. However, it seems to me it should still run a fairly full distro, although perhaps XFCE or another light window manager would make it all the more zippy.

So a distro like Xubuntu would be better suited for this pc? ill only have 512mb of ram when i first build it, but in a few months ill upgrade to 1gb of ram.

I was until recently running Slackware with fluxbox on a 750 MHz AMD Duron with 512MB SDRAM, and it was perfectly useable. It took a few seconds to load Firefox, and certain apps were a bit sluggish, but I got by fine with it. XFCE was perfectly good too, I just preferred to use fluxbox. Xubuntu would be fine, I would imagine.

With 1GB of RAM, it should be fine with almost any distribution (and any DE - KDE, Gnome etc.).

Awesome, thanks.

VIA Samuel 2, 800 MHz, 256 MB of RAM. Running KDE, main purpose is web browsing, kopete, mail.

I've never seen it swapping!