My home network (family computers aside) currently consists of 4 machines (named after bassists; go with it.)

My laptop, pastorius, runs Ubuntu exclusively and serves as my main thing-I-do-things-on. My home directory and swap are encrypted; other than that it's a fairly un-noteworthy setup.

My server, wooten, is the bastardized stripped-apart incarnation of my old desktop/gaming machine. It's a headless computer with an ATI X800 XT and an Audigy 2 in it. It runs Debian Etch and does Jabber, HTTP, and will some day do mail (as well as Freenet and Tor) for smartercode.net.

My router, berlin (i.e. Jeff), runs OpenBSD and uses a whacked-out PF configuration to keep the network protected from idiocy. The server is recognized not with just a static IP, but with authpf--I dynamically forward ports when the server SSH's to the router using the proper key.

The newcomer, squire (i.e. Chris), pretends to run Solaris, but doesn't really do anything at the moment. It will eventually serve 1.2TB of NAS space for all my backup and file-leeching needs.

Now here's the fun part: I want to turn wooten into two boxes. End goal: I want to set up a badass media production system using the overpowered-3-years-ago desktop hardware in it, keeping in the server the stuff that's showing its age. So the server's probably going to wind up keeping the PSU, maybe the CPU. The new box is going to steal the X800 XT, the Audigy 2, probably the motherboard and memory (since it really doesn't make sense to have non-ECC RAM in a server).

I'm looking for a fairly ghetto but F/OSS-friendly motherboard for the server, and everything not mentioned for the media box. I'm also looking for an OS to run on it. Ubuntu Studio looks spiffy, but I'm wondering if anyone has any other ideas?

Yay for naming a pc after Victor Wooten. A server at that.

You really can't go wrong with Ubuntu. The only downsides I've seen are a general lack of application distributions in a native Debian format, and the fact that the root account is only immediately accessible through the shell. But with its recent rise in popularity, that first one may go away rather soon.

Thanks for naming your router after me.

I've been hearing a lot about Ubuntu. What makes it better than others? Or maybe I should say what makes it so popular?

It's very user friendly for Linux. Dell's just started selling desktops with Ubuntu instead of Windows installed, and that's helping out it's popularity. People have actually heard of Ubuntu.

Yeah--mostly I think it's just that Ubuntu has happened to reach critical mass. It's user-friendly, it does lots of things right, and it usually stays out of your way. I don't touch Windows at all anymore unless I'm at work, and when I do it usually makes me mad. Frankly, Ubuntu's gotten to the point where I can throw it on someone's computer, show them where things are for a few minutes, and let them go. My mom's running it on her laptop, and if I can help it, I try to get others on it as well--it cuts down surprisingly on the amount of pro-bono family tech support I have to do.