Best OS for serving my home needs

[steviem]

Well my mac mini G4 seems to have been slowing down to a snails pace when doing everything I want it to do (and crashing when i try to run unison), so when I got my bonus this year, I bought a Dell PowerEdge SC440 for £200 through work discount.

I received it last week, but when I installed ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex) server on it, I managed to get a few services I need working:

Samba
HellaVCR
HellaNZB


But Samba isn't ideal, and I'm only using it because ubuntu's implementation of netatalk doesn't seem to play nicely with Leopard. I also can't get FFMPEG to work properly, I also can't get any daap or uPnP servers running so I'm currently doing all the home media sharing on my Mac Mini still.

I was thinking the easiest (although morally questionable) route would be to get OSX86 on there as I know what to expect with OSX now. Just it feels a little bit wrong and I would really rather get to be more proficient at Linux admin, just I'm beginning to think ubuntu might not be the best distro.

Anyway, these are the services I need it to run:

afp for iTunes on my MacBook to let my iPhone sync
usenet
TimeMachine backups (possibly)
Streaming to PS3 and Xbox360 (using TwonkyMedia or Mediatomb)
Streaming to Mac Mini (its new home will be my bedroom)
TV recording (if theres a way to get my Cinergy T2 working)
Transcoding from xvid to m4v (preferably in a cron job)


If anyone has ideas on the best solution, or on what they do, it'd be cool if they could let me know.

Thanks,

Steve

[belvdr]

You can just run NFS on the server and do your backups and all from that share. Ubuntu is a fine distribution to learn on. All Linux distributions have the same foundation, but what you'll find is that config files may be in different locations and things like that.

As for the other packages, have you Googled this stuff?

[steviem]

Well I got ffmpeg working and its currently going through my avi files and transcoding them to m4v, i set up a couple of bash scripts with some help from a Linux Administrator at my work.

I had to remove ffmpeg and a x264, then I built them both from source and selected all of the modules I needed for them, so that was good.

Theres a patched version of uShare that allows xbox360 sharing from the server, so I will try setting up that.

Reading about zfs though, I am considering getting 3 1TB drives and making the server into a solaris server, but I will play with it in vmware to see if it can be fully setup before I do anything though.

I'm sort of glad I didn't wipe it and try to start again...

[pointandclick]

The issue with netatalk is that Leopard requires 2 way password encryption.
Here's a how to http://www.blackmac.de/archives/58-Make-Netatalk-talk-to-Leopard-Mac-OS-X-10.5.html