ASK HN: I need a Linux desktop and programming workstation. Any advice?
My budget is $1500,  and I will use this as my main workstation for web development, publishing cross platform software (financial, mathematical, and data analysis), programming with Eclipse, Netbeans and the occasional Glade, experimenting with multicore programming in languages like C++, Java, Erlang and Haskell, experiment with NVIDIA CUDA programming in C, number crunching, database development, data mining and simulation software (both writing and running) and finally, regular office productivity (OpenOffice, Gimp, etc...), including substantial photo editing. Well, that's a lot of stuff, but I'll do each of them to a certain extent.&#60;p&#62;I'd like to get a Velociraptor (300GB) as my boot disk, and a larger disk for media files. This cuts my budget for a powerful quad core like the Q9550 though. I'm trying ECC configurations (I want 8GB of RAM) as well, on server boards, but the motherboards are double the price and so is the ram, so I can't get the 10000rpm disk. Please help me make a decision of what's really important and what components would you select.