Hi all, I'm building a computer soon and am anxious to know whether it will be compatible with Linux. Could anyone tell me a) how to find out whether the hardware will work with Linux or b) whether my system will work with Linux?

My build:

CPU: Intel Pentium Core 2 Duo 2x1.86GHz
Motherboard: Asrock ConroXFIRE-E SATA2
Memory: Corsair Value Select 1Gb DDR2 PC5300 x 2
Hard Drive: 160 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 7200rpm
Graphics Card: Sapphire ATI Radeon 9600XT 256MB DDR
Optical Drive: NEC ND-3550 Silver 16x DVD±RW
Monitor: 17" AG Neovo F417B 4ms(gtg) Black TFT Monitor

If anyone has any comments on the build in general then feel free.

Thankyou very much in advance.

Any new linux distribution should by default support you system, at least for office and internet operations.
If you want to use the system for games, you may need a little tunning
The XFree86 has support for the ATI Radeon
You may need to recompile the kernel to gain the maximum speed of your system or to use all it's features (select the processor and chipset, instead of using the defaults is highly recommended)

I don't want to use it for games, but I will be using it for graphic design and 3D work.

If you could go into a little more detail that would be great - this will be my first Linux PC.

For anything using graphics, the main thing is the driver for the graphics card. This driver should be included with XFree86, and the default configuration should work.
One more thing is the graphics support in the kernel.
In the character devices section(I only used 2.4.x) you should enable AGP GART support, select the right chipset for the mainboard, enable DRI support and select you video card from the list (Radeon should be in that list, I don't know for sure since my Red Hat 7 cannot compile the 2.6.x)
Newer distributions shoud have these setting set to on by default (again, I don't know how things are above Red Hat 8)