Linux Mint help needed

[Syri]

First off, what I'm trying to do:
I'm trying to set up an old pc to run overnight for downloads, and also to act as a file server. I've got a little linux experience, but not much, and very little of it goes beyond the gui.
I tried using ubuntu first of all, but 11.04 wouldn't play nice with the intel graphics. It said it couldn't load unity, so it fell back to gnome, only it was horribly corrupt. I then tried ubuntu 10.04 instead, which did work on the graphics side, but it kept randomly losing samba shares, and then suddenly started to disconnect from the wireless, and refuse to reconnect.
In the end, I did a bit of reading up, and decided to try linux mint. As I had problems with ubuntu, and also because I felt like going for the version advertised as running a bit quicker, I went with the debian version, running xfce. It's all installed fine, but I've hit a couple of snags.
Firstly, I can't seem to access it from the network. At first, if I tried to go to "\\server" from my windows box, it would ask for login details from the windows pc, none of which would work, whether I entered an account on the windows pc or the server. I've tried a gui tool to configure samba (gadmin-samba) but after using that, the windows pc seems to ignore the server altogether, it can't look up the computer name, and can't ping the ip directly. If I try to ping the ip address (192.168.0.2) it just gets "Reply from 192.168.0.7: Destination host unreachable.". Removing gadmin-samba hasn't made any change to this, so I'm thinking I'll have to dive in and change the settings manually. If anyone can point me to a decent idiot's guide to doing so, it would be appreciated.

If it helps, the pc is an old celeron 2.8 (prescott core) in a soltek qbic barebones case. I'm not sure how to get any info like motherboard chipset, wireless driver, etc in linux, if any of that is needed for it. Manuals have been lost long ago, as the pc's just been gathering dust for quite a while.

 

[MYstIC G]

Amahi Home Server - Making Home Networking Simple

 

[GimmlyThe3rd]

If you have got little linux experience, why not w2k or win2003 server?

I'd probably use red hat for the job.

 

[Syri]

It's because I've not got much experience that I'm using it, so that I can learn something new at the same time. I've got everything else as I want it, apart from the network sharing. If I have to, I'll just have to use usb drives to pass files back and forward, but I just want a more efficient method if I can.

 

[Killswitch]

Mint is a fine OS, but it's very...erm...fully-featured for what you're trying to achieve and it's not ideal for an old box that's going to run headless a lot of time.

I'd like to throw FreeNAS into the mix here. It's basically designed to be a network fileserver, it supports advanced filesystems like ZFS and it's generally very, very cool. It also has a built-in torrent client and (if you set it up) you'll be able to login from the internet to manage it (dynamic DNS, firewall-type stuff etc.)

That's what I'd do, I think...

 

[MYstIC G]

The latest freenas requires you boot it from USB flash/compact flash or you have to dedicate a drive to it.