Hey, im a n00b so, be detailed please, I currently have Mandrake 10(not mandriva), SUSE 9(personal and pro)ubuntu 5.04 and 5.10, red hat 7.2 and a few others available but not here yet, I want a file server, JUST a file server running linux for windows clients to connect to(in a workgroup, not domain). my current setup:

Pentium III 1.0 GHz
512 MB SD RAM
1 37 GB Hard Drive(for the OS and some storage)
1 76.6 GB hard drive(where all my files currently are)
1 NIC
1 Wireless Card
1 POS PCI video card

I'd like something with a nice GUI(preferably GNOME then KDE) something easy to work with, fast, and able to read and write to NTFS. I have a motorola WR850G wireless router, the wireless card in the server would not have to connect to it. my laptop however would sometimes connect to wireless, the router provides DHCP. this is not setup to high speed internet, i just got the router to have wireless in case u were wondering, this is just a personal file server. It is mainly used to serve me my MP3s, ISOs, (i'd need to be able to rip, and burn audio cds, DVDs and data CDs.)and I want it easily, yet securely accessable thru the wireless router and all wired clients. any recommended distros would be very hewlpful along with links showing in detail how to set this up, all clients connecting to will be running windows XP, windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003. And if I'm fixing someones computer i'd like it if i could just plug it into my router, and have it see the server right away. I don't need the server to be hidden i just want it so when i open the computer in network neighborhood for it to ask for a specific user name and password. also if I could VNC, or terminal serve into it that'd be really freaking cool too. thanks for help! If any of you have Yahoo IM or MSN Messenger please add me

yahoo. netmin17
msn luke.mccormick@gmail.com

Any of the distros you've listed can be a file server. I wouldn't use RH7.2 though since it is ancient. Personally I'd use Mandriva (Mandrake changed their name) and get the latest release from their website (www.mandrivalinux.com) since it has probably the best GUI config tools of any distro. However its not that hard to setup a simple file server by editing the smb.conf file directly if you use another distro.

Samba is easily setup as a file server, trying using webmin or swat (both are GUIs) or read the howtos at http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/ and http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Samba_Server

VNC is easily setup also http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/VNC

NTFS write support is not yet stable enough to be used AFAIK. However this only matters if you're trying to write to an NTFS drive on the same machine as Linux. Writing to NTFS drives over the network to computers running Windows is irrelevant to NTFS support as Windows on those machines will handle writing to the NTFS drive.

DHCP is also easily setup and there should be GUI tools for it in Mandriva and other distros or in webmin.

I don't know about the wireless card but if its not supported by default there might be a driver for it or a way to get it working with Ndiswrapper.

Give all this stuff a try and post back with more specific questions if you can't get something working, also consider posting to the forum of whatever distro you choose since you'll probably get more answers that way.

a nice gui... hmmm...

pick any decent distro, they will all have "nice guis" if you run a "nice gui" on it.... http://centos.org

Everythign you're asking for is just generic application functionality, something largely irrelevant to the choice of distribution. the only real thing would be NTFS support, but do NOT go into anything ever needing NTFS RW access, that's dumb. only ever do that as a last resort, it is too dangerous to want to do.

and don't ask for IM's or private mails... this is a public forum for a reason.

thanks for the quick replies, might have to wait a week or 2 before i post again since I'm on dialup and have no other way of getting mandriva any other way, I avtually downloaded mandriva 10 DVD but someothing must've gotten corrupted because it didnt boot and i couldnt get into half of the directories but i'll try it again.

There are plenty of websites that sell CDs of the Mandriva download edition (and any other Linux distro) for a small price ($10 or so).

Hey, its been a while since i posted last lol, anyway, i was playin around with suse 10 on my laptop and got my at the time windows server to see one of my 2 shares, so right now i'm installing SUSE 10 on the server and hope to setup shares and see how that works, i'll let you know how it goes later. thanks!

update: screwed up the smb.conf file, so im gonna load another distro on it to see if its any different. i'll update again later.