whats a good server to use

[Brianna1993]

I'M needing a good file server for a older box all i need it for is a file server I'M looking at Ubuntu server or debian.I have 2 250 gb hard driver and 256 mb of ram.Both ubuntu and debian's system requirements are about the same but as this will only be a file server is there another server with lower system requirementsthat that will work with Ubuntu 11.10 desktop?

Thanks

[Roxoff]

If you just want it to serve files, then all you need is a slimline distribution that looks like a Network Attached Storage device. There are two free ones that I can find FreeNAS (which actually runs BSD under the hood) and CryptoNAS. As they're free, you could try them both out and see which suits your needs best. There may be others too - there are some cheap-ish commercial Linux based solutions too.

[Irithori]

Didnt know about CryptoNAS, thanks
CryptoNAS seems to meet the rather low hardware specs.

The 8.x release of FreeNAS will not. It requires >4GByte RAM and but does offer all the goodies of zfs.
So for your hardware, you probably want to use the older 7.2 release.