[LAU] Building a DAW on Linux for Yamaha DTX II

Hello all, It's been over 10 years since I've done any digital audio stuff on my PC and now having finally bought a house, I'm actually going to have some room in the basement to setup a DAW, my Yamaha DTX II kit, keyboard, etc. and have some fun. Anyways, back in the day, triggering audio samples via MIDI was always a bit of a hassle with my (at the time) underpowered machine with the various VST instruments. I now have a P4 3.0GHz box with 2GB RAM and some sort of newish Soundblaster card and I'm interested in triggering live .wav/digital audio drum samples with my kit and some Hammond B3 emulators from my keyboard. I'd like to do some multitrack MIDI and audio recording as well (most likely overdubs so a multi-input soundcard/break-out device isn't really in the picture right now). Can anyone suggest what software (or any how-tos/sites) I should be looking at? What distro is best? I'm more confortable with Debian/Ubuntu personally. Thanks in advance