Which Linux For Me ... N00b

jellybeard999

jellybeard999

jellybeard999

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Im going to be setting up an old 500mhz/128mb system up for torrents and file serving.

Will need to be remote controlled (either UltraVNC or Vista RD - from my vista 64 HP main pc)

Will need to serve to windows boxes.

Can anyone recommend a distro and any apps ?

I have NEVER used linux before, so was thinking ubuntu ?

Any advice appreciated. Thanks.
 
Ubuntu would be fine, though perhaps a bit pokey when you're using the GUI owing to a smallish amount of RAM. You'll have to use the "alternate" installer rather than the fancy one because of it as well. No big deal really though.

VNC is OK, but to do it right you'd use PuTTY on Windowsx and access the box with SSH, giving you command-line access to the machine.

Samba is the name of the service that performs Windows network file sharing. There are a load of torrent clients available. Deluge and Transmission are popular ones, as is uTorrent running in WINE, a Windows emulation-ish layer-y sort of framework. The best, IMO, is rTorrent. It's command-line only and would thusly be perfect for SSH access. It might be a bit obtuse for a complete beginner to grok though.
 
There's a lot more documentation about setting up Ubuntu for the purposes he mentions. I'm thinking about his likely success of getting it all working hunky-dory most of all.
 
I did this exact thing using Arch Linux.

Samba for file server, r/k/*torrent for bitorrent and SSH with Putty on Vista for remote admin (you can also use web admin tools if you want).

Like Billy says the distro isn't massively important most packages are available on most distros. What matters is the documentatio nand support.
 
Outcast said:
http://crunchbang.org/projects/linux/
Click to expand...

From that site

CrunchBang Linux is not recommended for anyone needing a stable system or anyone who is not comfortable running into occasional, even frequent breakage
Click to expand...

Not sure it's a great idea if you want a 24/7 box.

I tried installing it on a similarly low spec machine, and either the iso file was broken, or the O/S is broken, because it came up with a load of I/O errors on install. I've tried about 6 other distros, and this is the only one to give this problem.
 
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