About this time last year, I was trying to get a Samba server running under Fedora C4, but never managed to get it off the ground... I'm hoping to try this project again in the near future but was wondering if maybe there was another distro better suited to this task. I'm looking for something to maximize the performance of a decently powered PC, and this is just for a home use.

All round I'd recommend Arch; it's a lightweight distro so it isn't too heavy on the resources. It's i686-optimised so makes better use of more recent cpus. Plus it's easy to configure.

Just my

I use FreeBSD 6.1-Release on an old PC to provide the services offered by Samba. It's a very simple thing to do, all I had to do was install FreeBSD, install the ports collection, install samba, write a configuration file and start locking down the machine. I'm sure most GNU/Linux distros would work fine using a minimal install option, my personal favorite would probably be Slackware Linux but any thing light weight should work. Arch, DSL e.t.c. If you need to get a fast setup that has an X Server on it, use PC-BSD (User Friendly'd FreeBSD) but I wouldn't reccomend it unless you need a window manager. Traditional BSD or minimal GNU/Linux systems would do better.

Shells are faster then graphical interfaces will ever be until they invent a "Mental Interface" that doesn't turn you into a mental case.

I just set up a samba server in Slackware 10.2 that is a primary domain controller/fileserver. It was all pretty straight forward if you take the time to read the documentation. I always recommend Slackware but thats just because its what I use. I havn't tried many other distros with server setups except Ubuntu(and I didn't like it too much). Also Slackware runs well on old machines.