[LAU] Building a DAW

I'm trying to talk the guys I work with, into building an inexpensive DAW for the analog studio that I currently work in. Right now we're old school analog EVERYWHERE. The only digital gear in the room are a few PCM 90's, and my Masterlink that I bring when I mix. We have a 2" 16-track machine, which sounds AWESOME, but at $250 per reel, a lot of our clients can't afford tape anymore. We really only need 16 in and 16 out. So my thoughts are to build a fairly powerful PC to run one of the multimedia flavored linux distros, putting four Delta 44 cards in it, and running Ardour. I am a free software user, but I haven't used it much for audio production, and I'm not a super linux hacker or anything. Would configuring a system like that be particularly difficult? Once the DAW is up and running, we would only need to buy two 16 channel snakes to break in and out of our patch bay. Best, Rich...