I'm sure you guys get this question far to much, but alas im new to linux. Im working on installing linux on a relatively older machine with a Pentium 4 2.8 processor and 512 megs of ram. I plan to use this machine as an ftp server with remote desktop capability so that i can search for torrents and such while im at college. As afor mentioned, im new to linux and don't feel comfortable with a text based distro. I have been using linux Mint on my laptop for a few weeks and i have it working rather well but the laptop is a good bit more powerful than this desktop. Any suggestions?

Any distro will work fine.

Regarding torrents, I do a similar thing, but without the need for a badwidth sucking remote desktop by using rtorrent.

Basically I can browse for torrents using my notebook whereever I am, once I find one, copy the url to the clipboard, ssh home
and wget the torrent file into a specific directory on the home machine. I have rtorrent set up to automatically start downloading any torrents it finds in that directory. Using screen I can attach to a running rtorrent session to check progress, throttle or whatever.

Cheers,

Evo2.

well my school has a rather annoying web censoring tool in place, and while i can get around it with web based proxies, thats just annoying. I have been using logmein to get into my moms windows machine but her machine always gets messed up due yo very many les than competent people messing around on it. Im working on something that will be a bit more stable and reliable.

SalixOS is nice and light
http://www.salixos.org/wiki/index.php/Home

and Debian is hard to beat

how big is hd?
maybe boot many?

The hd is 80gb but i will probably throw a 500 in there eventually.

Ok, but I think a proxy would be far less annoying that trying to use a remote desktop.

Cheers,

Evo2.