Linux for a dual p3?

[pengyou]

I recently bought a dual p3 with 650 mhz processors and 1 gb of ram. I have win 2000 on it now and it is working fine as a simple workstation.

I would like to set up a computer to store books that I have scanned and information that I have found doing research. Part of it will ultimately end up online and part of it will be for my sake, to help me review and refresh or use in academic research or in the creation of e-books. I am guessing that within a relatively short time I will have 200 gb of data.

Does anyone have any of which kind of pc I should use? The PC will just be slinging around text and pics for myself - not multiple users. Do you think this dual P3 would be adequate? I would like to use Linux for this machine to help reduce the cost. The tasks it will be doing are not very complicated or varied so it should be a good learning exercise for me. Which variety of Linux should I use? I am willing to forsake some simplicity for the sake of speed. Once the hardware is set up there will be no changes for about 2 years, and only then when my hard drive begins to fill.

[GNU-Fan]

I use a small 1Ghz Celeron MiniPC for writing/compiling quite a lot of LaTex documents and store/browse them later. For this it is just fine. And it can play music in the background, too

But if you will need much processing on image files, like manipulating you scans, the P3 might be panting soon.

I use Debian for all my computing tasks and I recommend it for you as well. You should get the version "Lenny". Don't take my word for it, though. There are many LiveCDs which you can try out before even touching the harddrive. Of course, they tend to be a bit slower than real installs, but they will give you some good insights.
List of Live Distros - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Roxoff]

Debian is good, the other good one that I'd recommend for this role is CentOS (based on RedHat Enterprise). I use CentOS 4 on my server at the moment, and it's a very similar spec to your newly acquired machine.

If all you're going to do is serve document/pdf files, then that hardware will be more than strong enough, you may just need more disk space if you get a lot of documents (but hard disk space is really cheap). Mine serves music and video to the media centre and to other PC's in the house, and copes adequately while also hosting my web sites and email.