Having spent the past year in pure heaven using my new build quad-core I dusted off my previous PC the other day. It has XP Home and is so slow it takes 5-10 mins to get started and cannot run more than 1 task at a time (if at all). I wanted to setup a simple file server for movies, music, pictures, etc. but didn't think this old pile of junk would be of any use: Intel 2.6 single core 1 GB SD-Ram (maxed out) etc. How wrong I was. I have installed Ubuntu Server 10.04 using the stripped-down text mode and it is amazing. I play movies, gaming videos and listen to music from 3 to 4 laptops/PCs with Vista/Win 7/Ubuntu 32 & 64-bit clients using this server across my ethernet connections. There is no slow down and if I never knew better I would believe I had built a new server. How can such an old PC work so well? I know how easy it is to share folders over Vista and Win 7 but I wanted a seperate system just in case I was busy with development/gaming on my other PC. I could not even run XP on the old box but it flies as a server with Ubuntu on it. Don't throw away those old PCs just yet...
A mate of mine done some thing similar with an old laptop and have impressive results even with just 256mb ram, it did go up to 512 in the end though.
Well to the world of FOSS The linux kernel is very well tuned for multi-tasking and has always been very reponsive, the IP stack is seemly second only to BSD's and will multi-thread unlike some I could mention (looking at you Windows 7) If you have PS3 or Xbox then mediatomb is a great UPNP media server to server movies to those and other devices. ps Micro XP (though I'm unsure how legit it is, is VERY speedy on older hardware)
I used to use a cut down version of XP, done with Nlite, it used to boot in 15 seconds with 12 processes running , went like a rocket
I'm ashamed to say I don't know what FOSS is! I even have very slow and old IDE 40GB drive but streaming from it is seamless. I have even streamed the same movie file on 3 seperate machines at 5 minutes apart and all machines play the film great. I would never have guessed you could do this without scsi drives or new sata ones.
As has been said, welcome to FOSS! Whilst you're here, check out what else we can do if you're into small and low-resource.
I'm guessing the XP install was probably calling a load of bloat at startup -- I've brought a number of P4 XP machines back to life with a bit of msconfig-fu and tidying up. But yeah, FOSS server stuff is awesome -- I'm always inclined that way for backend stuff, especially for older hardware -- a GUI should be optional for that sort of stuff.
Linux (Fedora - can't stand Ubuntu) has given my old Sempron laptop a new lease of life and is far quicker than when it ran XP Sent from Bittech Android app
If you dont get on with straight Ubuntu give Mint 11 a go. Looking forward to the Mint 12 release no end.
I'm a fan of linux (also a fedora fan) only reason I haven't switched full time is gaming :/ Mint is very nice, feels fairly 'windowsy', so quite good for a first distro. Otherwise Fedora and Ubuntu are 'safe' options with lots of support etc.
I primarily use Linux on my PC - it's just so much faster and more sensible! Also Linux is far more customisable (although Canonical did limit that a bit with Ubuntu). And gcc runs natively on it. A programmer like myself cannot live without the joy that is gcc and Boost. Server-side, Linux pwns as well. As said before, a server should not have a GUI as it wants to use as little resources as possible, to leave the most performance for the process. Apache, a web server, is one of the de-facto standard servers now. Samba is the file server that you are looking for. Squid is the standard for proxies. Need I go on about Linux?
I loved using linux. My only issue is that gaming is difficult to set up, and I can't get my WiFi card to work with it.
