Hey everybody,

I know these "which linux distro?" questions have been asked repeatedly here, but usually with a destop use focus, it seems to me. I was hoping you all could help me with choosing a distro for my music server.

My music server is running old redhat 6.3 or something. It's run without skipping a beat for a few years now. Basically, all it does is SMB and occasionally NFS to my web server, serving a very large mp3 collection on a software RAID array. I have a totally separate machine OpenBSD machine that is my firewall/web/email/dns/etc. server.

When I first did this, disk drives were too small for me to economically have a RAID5 array. I just got three 320GB disks and I am going to rebuild the machine with a 600GB software RAID5 array.

The computer sits in a closet, so I won't be using the console at all. The current machine doesn't have any X installed on it. My desktop machine is (unfortunately) an XP machine because of software I need to use everyday. I'm pretty much a command-line guy when it comes to unicies.

I've been thinking that it might be cool to set up X and a VNC server on the new installation. I could run linux programs in a nice X environment on my XP machine.

Here are my questions for the group:

1. Does the recent recommendation of ubuntu still make sense for my application? The most important aspects for me are the software RAID5 and the server stuff.

2. Is running X applications over the network even worth considering? If so, would I be better of with an X client on the XP machine, like Hummingbird? Are there alternatives to Hummingbird these days? Free ones? Is the whole idea stupid and should I just build a little mini-itx desktop and do that stuff with a KVM switch?

3. My X experience is quite dated. If you feel installing X is worthwhile for me, which desktop environment should I be using for compatibility with the most/best software?

Thanks in advance for the advice,

Jim