I have finally decided to do something with the old AMD 800mhz computer sitting in my cloest. I threw in a bunch of spare hard drives and I have been working on turning into a Linux box. After reading these forums for countless hours and getting dirty by downloading and installing many distros, I have narrowed the playing field to Fedora FC3 and Xandros Desktop Deluxe 3.0.

I apologize for this post being on the same lines as "which distro do I choose", but I haven't found a post similar to my configuration.

I have designed my project to act as a centralized media center for my other machines in the apartment as well as my roommates gear. I need it to act as:

File Server, Repository - storing MP3's, movies, pictures, backups, etc. Most of use laptops and would rather simply stream the media. We use a modded Xbox in the living room as a media PC with a wireless connection and would like to stream from the server. I also use a HP IPaq rx3115 and would like to stream to that as well.

Web, FTP, Mail, Telnet, VNC server - I have a domain and would like to join the rest of the world having my own little corner of the web. It will be a simple way to post stuff about my life for friends and family, private FTP, custom email addresses, and a way to connect and configure it remotely (such as from work to defeat the corporate firewall).

NEVO (HP's streaming media software) - For my IPaq. This only runs on Windows and will have to be run using Wine.

DVD writing - Unfortunately, my other machine is a WinXP laptop. The DVD burner is in the server. I need to use it to burn DVD's. Simple as that.

Not using this for web development, image editing, printing, web surfing, coding, etc. I have a laptop I use for that.

Growing up, I learned Red Hat fairly well, but stopped using it in college because it took too much time away from my drinking life. I forgot most everything about it, but after playing around with Fedora I got the feel back with much help from the forums. (Was much harder to figure things out with only BBS's information to refer to). I still consider myself a beginner (I can use VI!), but am eagar to spend time to learn things (love those man pages).

I would like to call this my "project", but I tend to lose interest in things easily, so I kind of want to speed up the project development.

So, I prefer to use Fedora so I can learn Linux from the ground up, but Xandros is simple so I don't think I'll lose interest before I get a working product. I know Xandros is a heavily modified Debian distro, but just how configurable is it? Could I do a quick setup on it, then still tweak it manually by editing the conf files (with vi!!!)? Or will that break it?

What would you recommend? I figure I lose interest in things (just ask my ex's) after about 2-3 months.

The Server:
AMD Thunderbird 800mhz processor
768k RAM
2 - 20gb IBM Deskstar
1 - 200 gb Maxtor
Generic 56x cd-rom
Sony 12x DVD Writer
Nvidia Geforce 2 MX
3Com 100mb Ethernet (don't remember brand, but it's auto detected)
Yamaha stupid little soundcard thing

Thank you in advance for all recommendations as well as criticisms.