>So if I put in about 256 RAM, you think I should be OK? I guess I a little wary of everything as I jump into my first linux project. I'm glad that this seems like a friendly linux community, as opposed to others I have tried that don't want to answer newb questions.


OK, I have Linux installed on a computer, it acts as a mail server (of sorts) / web server / file server / firewall / router. It is a Celeron 500 with 192 MB of memory. It works great for what I use it for... so yes, your P3 will work great as a file server as long as you set it up properly.

Things I do / programs I have on my computer:

Apache web server with PHP, MySQL and SSL modules
Courier IMAP server with SSL and Webmail modules
SAMBA to act as a fileserver
MySQL for when I need it.
Perl and Python
Caching DNS records
IPTables firewall

And it works like a charm. :)