Windows 7 Starter

[david1701]

XBMC is the dog's wotsits. It's one of those projects that concentrates more on power and features than ease of use and installation, but the effort pays dividends.
A good way to check it out would be to get the Sabayon live DVD (http://www.sabayon.org/) which includes XBMC. I use it in conjunction with MythTV as my PVR in the lounge, and on the bedroom XBOX and I love it.

deffo the dogs, it is ridiculously nice when it works smoothly, and xbmcbuntu has a stripped down version of ubuntu in it so you can use the tv for web browsing/email ect. With raspberry pi coming soon you should be able to strap xbmc on the back of every tv in the house

 

[Mr Haematocrit]

best distro to use for a file server would be centos as its built from RHEL so its stable and features mature packages, i would install it without a gui as this would just consume unrequired resources and use the ext4 filesystem or btrfs.
If you want more cutting edge packages I would look at Gentoo or Funtoo.

 

[david1701]

My file server happens to be in my bedroom hooked up to a tv, ATM running windows, so leaning towards xbmc for its front end, it's just I'm not sure how things run in the background on it

I spose I should look into serveryer distros but I'm just not that much of a power user (like I say windows server)