I've recently acquired a P3-550 which I hope to turn into a general-purpose network server for my home LAN. Before I get started, I was wondering if you could help me with a couple of items:

(1) What advantages, if any, does NFS have over Samba for sharing files? (I ask out of curiosity, mainly. I'll need to use Samba for exporting the "public" file area on the server as we have a Windows laptop, but I may share other directories from the server using NFS, if I only want to access them from my Linux machines.)

(2) Is there a "convention" for where in the filesystem you would locate a "public" file store (e.g. for people on the LAN to access multimedia files, etc.) on a Linux server? I thought of something like /usr/share/ - what do you use out there?

Many thanks in advance,
Tim