New system distro advise, please!

["J. Todd Slack" <]

Hello Gang,

I am specc'ing out building a system with the following specifications:

AMD Athlon 64 x2 4200+ CPU
8GB DDR2 RAM
2x500GB SATA HD's (needing to Mirror)
Gigabyte 570SLI Mainboard
2xDVD-RW
128MB GeForce 7300 Video
Wireless PCI Card

I have a nice Samsung 21 inch flat-panel monitor.

So a few questions/needs:

1. Any changes to this system to make it more linux friendly?
2. What distro should I run? I have used Slackware in the past, but had 
trouble setting up X-Windows. I need a graphical desktop.
3. What if I added a second Athlon 64 x2 4200+ CPU (I dont know if this 
is possible, yet? anyone?), what distro would be best for SMP?
4. I need to run VMWare Workstation 6.0
5. I want to run a nice resolution higher than 1024x768
6. I develop software and working with a nice company where my new 
position is writing linux based applications in Qt and wxWidgets and we 
are also developing a utility like DiskWarrior (on OS X) that will run 
on Linux, Windows and OS X.

Thoughts are appreciated.

Jason

(Fred Horan, are you out there?)