i'm kind of a linux noob. i've used it a good bit as a development platform in college, but i haven't run my own for any real amount of time outside of experimenting.

what i want to do is roll a nas box to live in the closet. i want file sharing and things of that type, where it get tricky is i would like to host all of my media on there and pull it into itunes on the computers on my network. i would also really like to use the xbox360's media connect software to stream that content to my TV as well. i know all this functionality is in windows home server, but i've heard bad things and would like to go the linux direction if its possible without too much hassle. any suggestions you have would be much appreciated.

If all you need to do is share files and folders with Windows machines (I believe the Xbox falls into this category) then I would suggest setting up Samba.

My cousin has an Xbox360, and I remember us trying to use SAMBA with his XBox360 to play media files, but it would not work. It needed Windows Media Center or Windows Vista. The media cannot play directly off of a Samba share. Someone correct me if I'm wrong because we couldn't figure it out.