Hi all. I am getting ready to buld a new computer and am thinking about putting Linux on it as the only os-no windows whatsoever. I have never worked with Linux before so am completly clueless. I intend to do alot of audio and video editing and want to be able to stream to my HD TV. The main specs I am looking at are:

MSI 870-G45 AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard.

EVGA 01G-P3-1366-TR GeForce GTX 460 SE (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP.

AMD Phenom II X2 555 Black Edition Callisto 3.2GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 80W Dual-Core Desktop Processor - C3 Revision.

Kingston HyperX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600.

May be a bit of overkill but I was originally building a windows machine in anticipation of BF3 comming out this fall (I know I probably wont be able to play it on Linux). Anyways, Will this work and what version of Linux would be recommended.

It is completely up to you as far as what distribution you would want to use.

http://distrowatch.com/

That is a good site to check out most of the distributions and such. Personally, I use Fedora on my laptop and desktops, BSD on my server (along with Fedora), and Slackware on my project computer. For a beginner, you should try out Ubuntu.

Cheers,

Josh

Spend the extra money and get a 870 chipset. #%^#% MSI is playing silly buggers, the GA-870-G45 is an old 770/SB710 chipset. That alone is enough to annoy me. Truth be told, MSI lost any business they would get from me with the last MSI board I bought, the thing was nothing but trouble. Last I checked the Atheros AR8131M network chip wont work out of the box with linux as well, so you would need to compile the drivers to even get networking. AND I'm pretty sure I'm seen at least one person say that the GA-870 overvoltaged his AMD CPU with the voltages set to 'atuo' as well......

GTX460 SE, with 'SE' meaning 'slow edition'. A normal 1GB GTX460 isnt much more.

Thanx for the replies. I checked out the link to DistroWatch and will definatleydo some research there. Also Cascade, thanx for the info on the mainboard. I will definatley check into a different board. Again thanx for the replies and info, I'm chomping at the bit to get away from windows and apreciate any help I can get.

I'm gonna mark this as solved but if anyone has more suggestions, I'm open to them.

You might want to check the Linux HCL, see top right menu of this page