hello. i am, of course, a newbie. the only linux i have ever used is Linspire, which i just installed last nite. i have an old Pentium MMX PC that i would like to set up as a linux fileserver. i am looking for opinions on what distros would be good for a newbie to start w/ a project like this. thanx.

It really depends on the hardware. I would recommend a slim distro if the hardware is really old, but if we are talking Pentium 3,4 or an Athlon, I would recommend SuSE or Mandrake for their ease of use and configuration. Additionally, is the file server going to be accessed from windows machines or just other Linux boxes? That will determine which file server software to use (Samba if Windows is involved, NFS if it is not).

ya, its going to be on an ms win network. like i said, its an old Pentium MMX, which limits my choices somewhat. the big obstacle, i think, is going to be keeping the command line commands straight. (unless there's a good gui that will run on such old hardware.) ive been using windows for so long that i dont even remember most of the dos commands.

i would actually try to use Slackware. I've found that a stripped down version of slack will run on "just about" anything.

setting up Samba would not be that difficult as I have done it about 20 times at work. Slack doesn't have all the pretty eye candy install stuff, so it should work.

my only thing would be, is the hard drive going to be big enough on the fileserver to actually hold enough files. We have a lot of Photoshop files and CAD files that are just huge so the hard drives we were to use had to be pretty big. In this case, the kind of CPU you have would not run a 160g hard drive.

ya, i was planning on using a 60GB hdd, but found out that the BIOS currently only supports up to 8GB. there is an upgrade (supposedly) that will let it support up to 40GB, but the flash utility says that the BIOS doesnt support flash upgrades. even just 40GB would be plenty, as it is going to be used in my home as a supplement to my almost full 15GB Toshiba media server. i have plenty of storage in my computers (80GB in one, 240GB in another), but i want to be able to access my files from any computer in the house without having to leave them all on 24/7.