Well probably not, but much easier than expected.

I am posting this from a computer I decided to build about 4 hours ago. I went to Fry's, picked everything up, brought it home, and assembled it. I already knew which case, motherboard, and proc I was going to buy, so it didn't take too long to do the shopping (took longer to find someone to ring it up, then longer to stand in line). I came home and put it together. I had downloaded a bootable DVD image of Suse Linux a while back, and since that is what will ultimately be installed, I decided to see if it would run off the DVD. Fired up like a champ, and even pulled an IP from the router.

Good job, so what are you running with now? mobo/proc/memory/video?

Antec Sonata quiet case w/ 380w power supply
Intel 865PERL mobo - 800FSB, onboard audio, no NIC or 1394
2x256 Kingston ValueRAM DDR3200
P4 2.4GHz 800FSB proc retail
Promise FastTrack100TX2 IDE RAID card RAID 0+1 *
(4) Western Digital 120GB ATA100 disks with 8MB cache *
ATI Radeon 7500 64MB video card AGP 4x *
Intel 10/100 NIC *
Sony 16x DVDROM 48x CDROM
Added 120mm fan to drive cage
Round IDE cables

* I already owned these parts

It is going to run Suse Professional 9.2. I am waiting on the media.

Will 512MB be enough RAM? Would it be worth it to splurge and juice it to 1GB?

512Mb should be adequate - it really depends on what you're going to be doing with the system.... I run SUSE 8.2 Pro on my laptop with only 256Mb RAM, and it does me well for day-to-day stuff (programming, remote admin, web development) - the RAM is always almost completely in use, and swap activity is very minimal. If you're going to be doing anything really intensive (video editing and the like), and you've got the $/£ to do it, then a gig of RAM is never going to be a bad thing.

We've had big problems with IDE RAID at work (this is on a Windows 2003 Terminal Server however) - some of the new HP Proliants come with a two disk mirror - and the RAID tools provided by HP are useless, you end up having to bring the entire server down, going into the RAID setup and rebuild whilst the servers offline - defeats the purpose totally - it'd be just as easy to fit a new disk and restore from a backup - it'd be twice as fast too.... I've played around with software RAID under SUSE before, and I've got a little article on my site here although this will most probably be irrelevant for your purposes as the RAID board should take care of RAID management and control anyway.....

Cheers
ZB

Thanks for the advice. As it turns out, the RAID card is giving me fits under Linux. I used one a couple years ago to build a RedHat file file server for a client, and it worked great. But when trying to install Suse 9.2 or Mandrake 10.1, they are saying support for these cards went away after the 2.4 kernel.

So I am not sure what to do. It does not have to be a hardware RAID, and I am fine with it being a software RAID. I guess I will make a new post about it.

EDIT: new thread is at http://www.unix.com/filesystems-disks-memory/16343-ide-controlled-raid-card-issue-suse-9-2-a.html#post60355