As for the "what CPU", I'd dive into the classifieds and buy an entire low end Pentium 2 or 3 rig. It'll happily have the grunt to serve local media over the LAN, and be a small personal web/FTP server.
I'm rocking a P2 @ 350Mhz, 512meg ram, software RAID-5 (hell yep!), on Debian Linux.
You might mock, but it's got sufficient go to stream HD content over my local network. AND it runs SABnzbd, AND torrentflux. Oh, and idle it draws 55 watts, including the four hard drives in it. Plus, it's environmentally friendly; this system would have gone in the bin if I hadn't bothered to make it into a server!
I'm rocking a P2 @ 350Mhz, 512meg ram, software RAID-5 (hell yep!), on Debian Linux.
You might mock, but it's got sufficient go to stream HD content over my local network. AND it runs SABnzbd, AND torrentflux. Oh, and idle it draws 55 watts, including the four hard drives in it. Plus, it's environmentally friendly; this system would have gone in the bin if I hadn't bothered to make it into a server!