I have a very old computer, an original pentium 133, and was wondering if this idea would be reasonable:

*grab a large hard drive for cheap and some more RAM (wouldn't want to spend more than $50 on it all)
*set up a linux server
*put all my music on the hard drive and use a program like jinzora or ampache to set up a secure streaming music server
*also use the computer as a secure ftp and print server

No more than 2-3 people would be streaming songs at the same time, but still, I have no idea if this idea is doable with this old of a computer or if it's laughable.

Any advice would be appreciated on what type of distro might be best for this or any other tips for setting this kind of thing up. I have no experiencing setting up a linux server, but a good bit of experience with linux as I've been running it exclusively on my laptop for 3 years now.

Thanks in advance!

It should work for you, I can stream and play mp3's on a 233 mhz Pentium with no problem. Ram really is the most important thing in that situation so make sure you have the maximum amount the system can use.

The print server part I'm not sure on though. I've never set up a printer server, and I'm not sure the load it puts on a system. I would assume it would work though.

Thanks a lot! I think I'll max out the RAM and give it a try.

Can I ask what distro you use and what program you use to stream the music?

I use Slackware, mainly due to the fact that I already knew how to use it, but also becuase it generally extremly well optimized out of the box and it's easy to limit the install to just what you need.

For streaming I use Jinzora, though it's not extremely quick and might be kind of hard on your server. Ampache is good and is a little quicker in my opinion. I would try Jinzora first and if it's too much of a drain on your system resources install ampache and see if it works better.

well.. you can pretty much use any distro for it. if you can you'll want to stay away from big graphical environments (preferably none at all) for best performance..

as usual I have to recommend debian and slackware, as they are both great multi-purpose distros and can be very lightweight.
both will require that you put some work into setting up and in this respect you might be better off with debian, as it is more likely to have packages for the somewhat obscure software you want to use, it sucks a lot to have to compile even the simplest of programs on such hardware, I used to use one and had to compile lame and convert some ogg vorbis to mp3 for a video class, it took the entire class and it sucked. if you end up compiling your selected applications, you'll want a more powerful box to do it on and you can use checkinstall to create packages that you can just install on the other box.

I, also have never set up a print server but I'm pretty sure it would work okay.