I'm building 2 PC at home, a file server and a media PC in the living room, and would appreciate some help choosing distros for them (they need not be the same but I suppose it would be easier for me if they were). Here are some basic HW specs and what I'd like them to do.
Questions:

1. Where would I find info on bootup times?
2. Which is the fastest booting distro?
3. If I only need the fileserver to be in a state such that Samba runs and I can transfer/backup files, what init level is that?
4. What would be a lightweight (doesn't take up a lot of system resources, since its not very powerful) distro for the media PC?

1. Not really sure
2. I imagine Slackware since it is a pretty light distro.
3. Init level 3
4. I'd say Slack or maybe Xubuntu

musicman_ace, thanks for your pointers. i will look into them.

anybody else has suggestions?

I'm on a CentOS kick right now (see my thread in the general linux section), so I'd say go with CentOS. Use the gui to help you get everything configured nicely, then switch to run level 3 to boot with only the necessary services. To enable samba at run level 3 just enter" chkconfig smb on" in the command line.

I'll second Slackware for the fileserver. Although, Geexbox would probably work wonderfully for your media pc. It's got the smallest footprint I've ever seen for a 2.6 kernel. It's already set up to act as a media center, so you can't go wrong there. No Bittorrent, but adding it should be relatively trivial.

I would probably change your Media and Fileserver to look like this below. You will need more horsepower on the media sever than you will on the fileserver.

twilli227, i was thinking of that myself actually. the 440bx is currently the fileserver but i had to retire it for 2 main reasons: (a) its file transfer performance (network as well as hdd-to-hdd) is not quite up to par due to aging hw (b) i have a lot of hdd!

Spinlock, thanks for the pointer to geexbox. its system requirements are p2-400 so i'm ahead of the game on this one! are there aother "media center" distros that you know of? this distro seems to boot right into the media app. i wonder how one might be able to load a bt client (like azureus) on it, any ideas?

msound, i appreciate your suggestion. however, centos calls itself an "enterprise class linux distribution", so i'm not sure if thats what i need.

I must have missunderstood. I thought these 2 systems were what you are going to use? Are you upgrading these systems or building new ones?
MythTV is another one. You could check out KnoppMyth which is a live-cd.
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=knoppmyth
Don't let the "Enterprise Class" scare you. If you are comfortable using a linux distro, especially if you have ever used Fedora, then you will be fine using CentOS, if said distro has what you need.

twilli227, the 440bx is what i am currently using as a fileserver. the chaintech is something my bro is giving to me. i intend to convert the chaintech into the fileserver (shift the hdd's over from the 440bx) and convert the 440bx into a media center for the living room.

i have heard about knoppmyth, however i do not intend to record shows (why record when you can BT? *grin*) thus i did not look into it. does it do playback of media besides what it records also?

I'll download the latest version of Geexbox and see what I can figure out on remastering it. I don't know about Azureus, as I think that adds the necessity of the JRE, which is HUGE. I'm reading good things about both qBittorrent and Ktorrent... I'll check out qBittorrent, as it seems to require the least dependencies. Get back to you ASAP.