Distro Choosing help / File Server Help

[yojimbo85er]

Well I have a spare computer that is a ECS Rs400-a motherboard with Celeron 2.8Ghz, 1Gb of DDR2 667 with about a 500GB WD HDD. Here's my question I'd like to turn that computer into a file server for use at my home. The clients will be two Window 7 and one Window XP machines. I don't want anything else going on with the celeron computer except just storing files for the clients and easy access to the files. What would be the best distro to get this up and going and if you could point me towards some documentation to help me getting started. I know how to install linux just don't know how to go about setting it up to be a file server. Someone told me that some of the distro will let you access and control them through a webbased interface so I'd like that or just a standard VPN so I can control it from the clients. Thanks.

tl;dr I need a distro for an old computer to turn into a file server for my home

[jayd512]

Hello and Welcome!

To be honest, your machine will handle pretty much any distro you wanna throw at it.
And any distro on the market will do you just fine as a web/file server.
Are you looking for anything specific?

[yojimbo85er]

Well I've messed around with a few in VM like fedora, OpenSuSe, freeNAS and I might go with OpenSUSE. I know how to install and I've messed with ubuntu and redhat years ago and played around with them for a few months. Basically all I need to find is some documentation to help setup a fileserver on it. When I google for help its all about web servers, email servers and a bunch of other stuff I don't want or need. I just want my 3 machines to use and access it as a file server, I don't want it on the internet or anything just large storage computer for files. Let me know if you need more info.

[reed9]

If you're going to be sharing with Windows clients, you'll want to use Samba.

Samba - openSUSE
http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=Setting_up_Samba