So I was thinking about trying this little project. I'm in the US Army and when I'm in the states I live in a barracks, which is basically a multistory building with about 40 people in 20 rooms on each floor.

When I get back to the US, I was thinking about using my old desktop (going to buy a new one) to set up a media server for the people on my floor. The idea will be to have it on its own non-internet-connected router, broadcasting so that anyone on my floor can pick up the signal. Everyone with access will be able to add movies and music to the server and copy them to their own local computers, but not be able to delete anything. I'd want to make a predefined list of file extensions (composed only of audio and video extensions), and if a file doesn't have a listed extension, it can't be added without root access (to prevent viruses from spreading to windows users).
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Would this be something that could be easily (or at least not impossibly) accomplished with a Linux setup?

Its not something that would be sustainable for more than a month or two I know, its more of a learning experiment to see if I can actually make it work correctly. Just asking here to make sure I'm not about to start too huge a project.

Thanks!

Doesn't sound like that big of a project, if I am understanding you correctly, it would be no more than a few minutes of configuring whatever file protocol you want to use (probably Samba, if you are dealing with mainly Windows clients).

Doesn't sound like you would need a router either in this case, and could do just as well to put a PCI WiFi card with a good antenna in there. Then you can just put the card into Ad-Hoc mode and let your clients connect directly to the server rather than to the router first. Of course, if you want multiple Ethernet ports going into the server, then it would make sense to just plug a router into it and use that for WiFi access as well.