Obligatory 1st Post

Hi.

Background

I'm going to list my experiences with Linux here. For starters, I'm using Ubuntu 8.04. There's all kinds of different distros to choose from, but Ubuntu is (in my opinion) the friendliest to configure and easiest to use.

I got started by downloading the disc image (.iso) from the site linked above, and burned it to a CD. I also cleared out an old computer. It's a 1g Celeron with ~512 meg of RAM, a 40-gig main drive and 200-gig storage drive. There are lots of guides online to installing Ubuntu--the only thing I'm going to point out is that when it asks what drive to install to, select the "Guided" option, and use the entirety of your primary drive.

Goals

I've actually got two machines I'm working on. The one described above will be an FTP server, music server for this and this, BitTorrent server with remote access, and perhaps a proxy server.

The other machine is a $200 refurb IBM I got at Microcenter. It's a P4 2.26 with 1 gig of RAM and 500 gigs of storage. I've ripped most of my DVDs to it, and plan on using it as a Tivo and DVD jukebox. I'm currently running WinXP Media Center Edition on it, but want to switch over to MythTV. MythTV is MUCH more powerful (and free), but more complicated to get going. More on that later.