I've turned an old HP Pavillion Pentium III (256 MB RAM) into my home entertainment juke box. Originally I was going to edit my MP3s on my Windows XP machine and port them to the jukebox machine. However, after using Amarok under Ubuntu, I've realized it makes a lot more sense to do this edits in Amarok on a Linux machine. I therefore got a more powerful PC and put Ubuntu and Amarok on it. It's a debranded HP Pavillion dual core Athlon 64 3800 with a gig of RAM and a 250 gig hard drive. I've slapped Ubuntu 8.04 on it and it runs great.

Sharing resources between the Windows and Linux Pentium III PC is therefore not necessary. I'll be sharing resources from one Linux machine to another. If I do anything on the Windows PC, it will be simple to sneakernet it with a thumb drive over since my Athlon Linux machine is right next to the Windows PC, sharing its keyboard, mouse, and monitor via a KVM switch.

All three of these PCs (plus my Vonage) are hooked up via a simple wired network and all are accessing the Internet just fine. I have some questions:

1. Should I uninstall Samba from the Pentium III machine?
2. I'm googling in search of Linux networking primers. Does anyone have a must-read Linux networking primer I should check out? I want to be able to easily copy to and from folders on both Linux machines.
3. What should I use for anti-virus on my Linux PCs. I know it's not as critical to use AV as it is in Windows, but I still want to have AV as a precaution.
4. Should I upgrade the Pentium III machine from Ubuntu 7.10 to Ubuntu 8.04?

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

1. yes
2. plenty... there is a good book by Carla Schroder too

3. clamav
4. If you want to upgrade yourself, install kde4 as well

Best

A. Mani

Thank you very much for your help. It is greatly appreciated.