A P3 500 is way more than enough for most server things in a home/broadband environment. Somebody said somewhere that a P90 running the Apache web server could fill a 1.5Mbit pipe. Of course, lots of CGI will slow things considerably.

My web server/firewall/mail/etc server is a P3 300MHz and it is more than sufficient for me.

My music server, which runs an old version of Red Hat, has software raid on a library of 300+GB of mp3 files. It is only a 133Mhz Pentium with 32MB of RAM. I run Samba so that the music appears as a Windows share on my Windows machines. I can play music on the server, upload new music to the server and browse the shared directory from a Windows machine all at the same time and it keeps up. In fact, it has sub-second response on the browsing from the Windows machine with all of that going on.

I can make it skip with a large file transfer, music playing on the server, and 2-3 other client Windows machines playing mp3s via the shared drive all at the same time. A cool thing about UNIX/Linux is that the multitasking is managed by the kernel not by the processes and you can adjust priorities. So, if you're playing music with the machine and you don't want it to skip, you can adjust the "nice" levels of the other services to always give priority to the player application.

You'll be amazed at how fast a P3 500 is after you get the godawful Windoze off of it.

One other thought: if you really want to learn, stick with the "console" and don't use Xwindows right away. It takes significantly less resources and removes some of the widget issue. A *great* console mp3 player is a program called "mp3blaster".

Jim