Thanks for you replies!
I'm thinking I will go for CentOS 5 since webmin/Virtualmin have an install script for it.
Also think i'll get a 500 gig hard drive for back ups, think this will be big enough for now? Not sure if my motherboard has any sort of raid need to look in bios, but would that be the easiest option if I wanted to expand or mirror the hard drive? I looked at LVM but it seamed kinda complicated at first.
Not been able to get BackupPC on the server I have going at the minute... not sure why, the web admin doesn't seam to want to work. But a new install may help with that. I'm more stuck with samba. I think I need to read through some more stuff as I cannot seam to get the permissions etc round my head =S. I can access 1 share I made but none of the others, the password window just keeps coming back up.
Is there nothing where you can click boxes of share you want users to be able to access like in Windows server? (

I tired Windows home server out one time, was pretty easy, but I don't mind a challenge and I just dont trust Windows to actually work)
Also, if I installed the GUI like Gnome. but didn't have it running all the time, would this still pose the security threats you mentioned?
Thanks again for you replies (Y)