help me with server

[Steveotjie]

hey guys, i am planning to set up a small home server, nothing fancy. i want to use an old 800mhz p3 with 128mb of ram to do this. I would like to go the linux route in doing this, my question is this: What distro would be the best to use as i would like to use this server as a mail server, ftp server and as a storage server over the lan.
my biggest concern is the performance of the old p3, is it possible to setup a server on such old hardware and get fair (not good) performance out of it?
Maybe anyone knows of good a distro that can do all of this and not be resource intensive, i prefer graphical installers as i am a newbie to linux, but im not worried about the gui as long as it works for initial setup and thus saving memory and cpu resources

[reed9]

Any distro can perform those functions and generally performance will be pretty equivalent. A particular piece of software is going to run about the same on whichever distro you use, proftpd is proftpd whether running Debian or CentOS or whatever. Choosing lightweight software options will make more of a difference than the distro.

You probably will not want to install a GUI on the machine, or if you do, default to not running it unless you have to. Most distros have a graphical installer or if using a text installer, it's ncurses based and not particularly more difficult than using the graphical installer.

Stick with one of the major distros and you should be fine.