[Degs]

Hi Guys,

I am looking to replace my old windows XP home server with the new INTEL SS4200-EHW.
This unit comes as a hardware only with 4 SATA drive bays powered by a Celeron 420 1.6Ghz and 512mb of RAM. its reasonable powerful compared to a lot of the home HAS servers out there at the moment.
It has no software and is designed to be able to take whatever software you want to put on it inc Windows home server.
I am getting rid of my windows XP server mainly to get rid of Windows and would like to put on a Linux NAS software that will have not only media serving abilities but also take anything else I can find that will be useful, apache, remote management etc (all bread and butter stuff for Linux I suppose)

I am new to Linux and have only had a basic experience of it. I would therefore like to know your thoughts, as Linux experts, on what your favourite media serving Linux OS is and why. I want to set up this server to connect to any OS (MAC, WIN, LINUX) and be able to be expanded into other uses in time (recording my phone calls, recording the output of IP cameras around my house etc). Also, good power management
functionality is important to me as I dont want it wasting power when I am not using it. I think this server has ACPI but I have had no experience of this standard. I have been advised from friends of FreeNAS, Ubuntu server and FreeBSD but have has no experience of any of these. I have never built a Linux box for myself before.

what dya think guys?

thanks for any advice you can give me...

Degs

Some more reading I have found:
description of the SS4200 from Intel: Intel® Entry Storage System SS4200-EHW Overview

one of the threads I have found: A suitcase full of storage - exploring the Intel SS4200 - The Something Awful Forums

[FredSource]

I'm no expert, but there is a home server offering from Amahi Linux Home Server that will setup a home server for you. It will be your DHCP server and provide first class networking (to ensure all varieties of machines can talk to it!)

On top of this is provides a VPN and some basic web apps, like a WebDav server for calendars, a Wiki and so on. Currently you can use Samba for setting up new file shares, but shortly the team at Amahi will have a web based interface for setting up users and shares. From the blog at Amahi the next thing planned is a media server as part of the bundle (of course, since it's Linux based you can install any other Media server).

Hope this is helpful....