OT: hardware recommendations?

[Richard Cobbe <cobbe@airmail.net>]

Greetings, all.

My PII-233MHz is beginning to show its age (already?!), so I'm looking
for a replacement.  The idea of saving a few bucks by building my own
system from components has its appeal, but frankly, I'd really rather
not bother with the effort of trying to make sure that all of the pieces
work well with Linux: the time it would take is worth more than the
$100-200 I'd be able to save.

So, I'm looking at Penguin Computing's Tempest 210MP workstation.
Obviously, with Penguin, Linux compatibility isn't a problem, but they
sell RedHat, so I'd like to be relatively sure that at least one of the
three current branches of Debian work well with this stuff.  (I'm
already fairly certain that Potato doesn't have support for the video
card.)

Oh, and I do in fact run Windows 95 from time to time, mostly for games
(which require DirectX, so VMWare/Win4Lin won't work, and I haven't yet
tried WINE).

Here are the components I'm a little concerned about:

Graphics card:
    baseline model is an ATI 8MB Rage Pro AGP; other alternatives
    include the Nvidia GeForce 2 MX (32 MB SDRAM), GeForce 3 (64MB DDR).
    I'd like to go with the ATI, because my graphics needs are pretty
    modest (see below), but X support for the Rage Pro appears somewhat
    dicey.  What experiences have people had with this card?  Would this
    card require testing or unstable, or does it work with Potato as well?

    When I say gaming, I'm not talking about FPS or heavy-duty 3D
    graphics stuff: I tend to prefer strategy games like Civilization
    II/III and FRPGs like Might & Magic, where raw rendering speed
    really isn't all that critical.  Plain 2D graphics are far more
    important.  And, I've only got a 15" monitor, so resolutions higher
    than 1024x768 give me eye strain.

Sound:
    The choices are Creative Labs SoundBlaster 128 PCI or Creative Labs
    SoundBlaster Live! 5.1.  Again, my needs under Linux are fairly
    modest: the occasional MPG, AVI, RealAudio, or QuickTime movie.
    
    Based on web searches, the SoundBlaster Live! seems to be supported
    well enough with the emu10k module, and the PCI-128 works well with
    the ALSA drivers.  Again: any comments?

On a second note, my CD-RW drive has apparently just died.  (When you
stick a new blank in, it scans the disk looking for something or other.
It's no longer finding it on about two thirds of the disks, and attempts
to burn the other third fail with a buffer underflow---which I've never
had before, even writing at 4x.)  I'm looking for an internal SCSI
writer---any recommendations?  I'm told Plextor is quite good.

Thanks much for any advice,

Richard