I am considering making a file server for our apartment here. We have a total of 7 pc's and we often are sharing many files between each other. Right now we use one guys PC as a main file server but he is not always here and its not always on. I pretty much determined Linux is the way I want to go for the OS. But I am stumped as far as what sorta of specs would I need and hwat not. I want it to be cheap really and I figured on using like a Athlon XP 2000+ or something along those lines. Any suggestions? I tried a Athlon 64 but it came out way to expensive because we need a 250gb drive at least (and we will use it too )

My file server at home is a PII-350 with 384MB of memory. It really doesn't need to be a gamers machine (specs) to be a good file server for only 7 machines. Mine serves 6 machines quite well.

Hmm I was thinking of actually this kind of setup:

Athlon XP 2000+ (as they all cost the same after this price anyways so might as well get the fastest for the same price)

512 mb of Ram (2x 256mb sticks of PC2100 ram which should be the bus limit for this processor anyways)

1 20gb 7200 RPm drive for the OS
1 250gb 7200 RPm hard drive for data storage and being the primary unit

A Shuttle AN35N-Ultra board as thats what I have and think its a good Athlon board with nForce 2

No Soundcard

A hercules geForce 3

Antec Sonata case with a 380 Watt PSU

a Belkin UPS

keyboard/Mouse/17inc monitor

So I have the Ram , video card, monitor, 20gb hard drive, keyboard and mouse alreayd (taken from old PC builds which were leftover parts)

So The rest overall will cost like 450 bucks. I am thinking of using Slackware for the Distro with Kernel 2.6.7 What do you all think?

A nice clean install of Debian on my old 300Mhz with 320MB of RAM and less than 10 GB hard drive runs very well. I run FTP, Apache, MySQL, Webmin, PHP, and more on it and it's really fast. Just do a basic installation and you should be set. You can even SSH into it and fix stuff right over ethernet. You don't need to spend money, just set it up on one of the old ones.

GL

You might as well just have the OS on the 250GB hard drive, I don't see the harm in having it set up on the single hard drive as long as you have it partitioned properly before you start adding everything to it. Or you could possibly do a RAID setup. If it's just going to be a file server, I wouldn't dedicate anything to the computer other than the video card and ram. You can plug the keyboard, mouse, and monitor to it when you set it up, but after that, everything can be done remotely, and you can use the keyboard, mouse, and monitor elsewhere (Possibly having a dual-monitor setup on a computer or something). I also don't see why you'd have to go with the 2.6.7 kernel, the 2.4 series should be pretty good, so unless you see a reason to use the 2.6 series, I'd stick with 2.4. Other than that, looks pretty good. Slackware's a good choice, although it might take a while to set up. I don't really think the distro would be a big factor as long as it's not something like Lindows, because you can disable a lot of services and choose not to install a lot of the packages. I would say the top 3 distros for this setup would be (and order doens't mean anything) RedHat (take your pick), Debian, and Slackware. The main thing with file servers is that once they're up and running, there's no real need to update the programs. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I would just make sure to clean out the dust periodically so it doesn't build up too much, otherwise it can cause some problems....