I'm building a 1 TB file server and I'm thinking about running linux. I've never used linux at all before so I'm not sure where to begin. I thought about downloading the latest version of Suse and playing around but I wondered if anyone had a better idea. My requirements are:

1. Ease of setup - being a complete noob
2. Remote access - using VNC but if there is a better solution I'd like to know about it.
3. Fast performance and a light footprint.
4. Hardware compatibility with my 3ware raid card.

That's really it. Any advice is much appreciated.

If you run a terminal, text based linux system it is extremely reliable as a file server, web server, mail server, or whatever server. It is extremely important not to run a gui in linux if the machine is for anything important. I'm not sure how much server capability is built in to SuSE workstation. But, debian is a full blown server operating system, and one of the best. It is easy to recompile the kernel on debian systems, which you would probably want to do for performance. The problem I forsee for you is learning linux. It cannot be done very quickly. If you are willing to invest some time, it will pay off. But, when I think about it, MS Windows 2003 is pretty tricky to set up a domain on. The 3Ware card will work with linux since it is a hardware raid card.

Thanks for the reply. So my question is what would be the most efficient way to learn linux - specifically debian if that is the best server OS. I've got some free time this summer. I could spend an hour or two a day messing around with this stuff but I don't want to waste my time and be 3 months down the road and still have no idea what I'm doing. I'm fairly computer literate. I've been building my own machines for years, but I don't have any programming background. What are some realistic expectations?

Pretty much any Linux distro should be able to do this, but a major distro like RH Fedora/Debian/Suse are probably what you should look at, but see http://distrowatch.com/ ...
If you want to do this, google it and do searches on this site also for people who have done it before to see any probs.
Learning a new OS is not trivial, so try to devote largeish blocks of time and do a lot of reading.
See these links for manuals:
http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz
www.tldp.org
http://www.usc.edu/~lhl/tutorials/unix/
Feel free to ask qns here when you get hands-on

If you're going to be sharing files with Windows machines, you'll want to learn the ins and outs of SAMBA, which is the *nix software that shares file and printers with Windows. If you go with Debian and you use the stable version, I'd suggest going with the 2.6 kernel (2.4 is the default on stable) since I've found it to be a bit snappier and more likely to work wirh newer hardware. You might want to look at www.openfiler.com which is CentOS optimized for file server duties (CentOS is itself a rebuild of Red hat Enterprise Linux).

In any case, you have a lot of learning to do, so good luck! One more piece of advice -- check that your hardware is supported by Linux (most common stuff is with the exception of some wireless cards and winmodems) before you shell out $$$ for it.

I've downloadeed the latest Debian. I'm going to make a commitment to learning how to use it. But in the meantime, I'm going to run windows on my server. I want to get it up and running. Thanks for all the advice.