I'd like to install some version of linux on an old laptop that I have laying around and would like some advice on which distribution to use. To quickly summarize my background, I grew up on a Mac in the 80s, I used to sit in front of Sun Ultra UNIX machine at work, but the last 5 years or so, I've dealt with nothing but Windows. All in all I'm pretty computer savvy, but don't really care to spend much time dealing with it.

Here are my requirements. The laptop is pretty old, a Pentium II 366MHz with only 128MB RAM, so keep that in mind. I'd like the laptop to be a samba (is that really what I want?) file server for a large external USB hard drive. I'd also like it to be a print server for the other machines in the house to share a printer from. I'd also like to have the possibility of a web server (apache, right?) and ftp server, but this is lower priority. This machine would not really be used as a desktop machine much.

From my initial searching it seems like Ubuntu, Fedora and Suse are the most popular so I'd prefer to stick which one of those just cause it'd be easiest to find info, but if none of those are a good fit I am open to other suggestions. Let me know what you think. Thanks in advance!

They will all work just fine. This stuff is Linux bread and butter. Suse has some politics going on lately so I would pick either Fedora or Ubuntu from your list. The big difference between the two is the packaging system. That's about it. Good Luck. Have fun.

You'll probably want something a bit lighter than gnome running on it (I assume you want a GUI). Perhaps try Xubuntu in the first instance and see how it performs.

If you don't want to run a gui, then I doubt it matters too much.

A 366mhz Pentium II laptop likely has either USB1.0 or USB1.1. That means that any external USB drive will be SLOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWWWW. I'd use something else for a file server.

The ram will be below the 'on paper' requirements for a graphical install on a few distros. Having said that, it may well still work.

A better suggestion might be not to install a GUI or to chose a lightweight GUI (XFCE et al) as in command line mode it should work fine. Alternatively, use a lightweight distro (DSL, Puppy, frugalware,...)

If you are asking whether samba is the right program to use for file serving for windows boxes, the answer is yes. (And it also does printer sharing.)

Because of the memory limitation (and you could probably upgrade the ram for little money, but machines of this age tend to have very limited maximum ram sizes), you are probably better off if you are prepared to use it in 'command line only' mode rather than as a desktop with a gui. If you are scared of administering it via command line only, consider webmin.

You could add debian to that list, but if you need the gui, strongly consider one of the ones targetted at older/smaller machines, as mentioned earlier. For more information on specific distros, look at the excellent distrowatch site.