Hi,
I was building a new system and was not sure if Linux would work well with the components I was considering, or if the chipset of the motherboard would work well. Turns out it does work very well and I wanted to post my success in case anybody else had similar concerns.
I used:
MSI H55M-E23 motherboard that uses the Intel H55 chipset
Intel Core i3-550 LGA 1156 processor
2 Samsung 2GB memory cards. (Total of 4GB)
Asus PCE-N13 802.11 b/g/n PCI-Express Adapter. This network card says in bold letters on the box that it supports Linux. It does and installation of the drivers was very easy.
I installed Mageia 1 64 bit and it is working well. I did not buy an external graphics card. Just using the onboard graphics of the motherboard and processor seems to work well.