Hello,

Please excuse my newbness, I have a Dell Dimension 2300, 1.8 GHz processor 512 megs of ram, with a 13 gig drive and a 20 gig drive, plus two 40 gig drives. I want to run it as a samba server, or NFS. Whichever is easiest. What distro should I use to do this? I do not want it to be difficult, but also do not want it to be easy, so intermediate would be good. Thanks for your time!

Red Hat is the most popular distribution for servers. The leading edge, free version of Red Hat is Fedora. CentOs is a free clone of Red Hat. I suggest that you take a look at Fedora and CentOS. If you like them and you want support you should consider paying for Red Hat.

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Steve Stites

Thanks for your reply, I do not need support, just wanted a few opinions about what I should use. Again thank you for your time!

You can take a look to the UBUNTU family, especially XUBUNTU which have Xfce instead of Gnome, so it's lighter. In fact you have mainly 2 linux families: the red-hat based (fedora, centos...) and the debian based (ubuntu...), the main differences is the packages management. A last comment about the "distribution difficulty", in my opinion, you have "easy" distribs (like FEDORA and UBUNTU) which work with many hardwares out of the box, and "hard" distribs (like GENTOO) where you have to build your system by hand. But with an "easy" distribs you can always play with configuration files and learn the linux arch... That's why I recommend "easy" distrib, don't loose your time by trying to get your wifi card working...