I want to switch to a Linux OS.
I have a Dell Dimension 4500 and a Shuttle XPC SS59G, and I need to know if there would be a problem running Linux on them?
What versions of Linux would be best to run on the Dell and the Shuttle computers?

anything will run fine on both by the look of it, just pick the one you're most comfortable with. as the shuttle is a mini-itx based machine with built in graphics, you've most room for trouble there, but i would still say for sure that it will work at a basic level by default, and will be able to be tweaked if needed at a later date.

Thank you for your quick response.
My shuttle uses an onboard SiS Mirage Graphics display adaptor and a Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet adaptor.
Would this be a problem?
I also upgraded the Dell display adaptor to an NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 from their proprietary display adaptor. From what I've read on Linux forums this shouldn't be a problem with the Dell, right?

Any problems stem from inadequate support of Linux drivers from the hardware manufacturers. Notice that the video card manufacturers ship a CD with Windows drivers. In the same way, they need to be able to provide, at least as a download, drivers that support Linux. The alternative is to use the "generic" VESA drivers in Linux, which work well, but being "one size fits all" drivers, they will not necessarily allow fully using every feature that the card is capable of performing. NVIDIA provides very good Linux support--SiS is unknown to me.

The network adapter cards are in a similar situation. Some are well supported and others are more problematic. In that case, it depends on the chipset used by the card and I recall that Realtek is fine.

Thanks again for the quick replies. I have been looking at switching to Linux for a long time. This gives me something to start from. I should have done this before buying XP and Office. Would have saved me alot of grief and money. I already have FireFox and Open Office on the Dell and they work great, and they both came at the right price.

that's really not true at all. for vendors like nvidia and ati have reasonable drivers within X, absolutely no need to drop down to VESA with any card from them with the possible exception of *really* old ones. many people have no need to use the propritary drivers, and some situations are better suited to using the open source ones.
rtl8139 chipset is just about *THE* best supported chipset in the linux world.

You may not have noticed a key point--I am unfamiliar with the onboard SiS Mirage Graphics display adaptor, one of the "video cards" in question. I am not specifically aware of the level of effort expended by or on behalf of SiS to support the use of their products in Linux.

Well, for any specific hardware, look to the Hardware Compatibility List on this site, and feel free to post your experiences there, too. That's how it improves.

Get a Live-CD/DVD distro of Linux, and use that to test-drive Linux. You place the disc into your CD/DVD drive, reboot the computer, make sure that drive is the first bootable device in BIOS, boot from it, and follow directions. If all goes well, you should reach a graphical or text login prompt where you type in the suggested username/password combination (usually 'guest', 'demo', or the name of the distro) and then are shown the wonderful world of Linux. If there's a problem, the distro may provide special boot-options to bypass the troublesome hardware or software.

A lot of the live-disc distros are even installable from that same disc, once you've seen how well it works on your system. Yeah, the live cds are a great way to "try before you buy"

Some of the live distros to check out are: Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, ZenLive...well, acid_kewpie's signature has a link to a distro-selector. You can also go to http://distrowatch.com/ and see which distros are most popular at the moment. And http://www.reviewlinux.com/ has many sordid reports of other peoples' experiences in various versions of Linux.