I picked up a dell inspiron 531 from a charity shop and I am looking to install some form of linux on it to make it a form of media and file server. it has a amd athlon x2 3600+ and 3gb of ddr 2 ram. I have managed to get ubuntu 14.04 installed on it but I think that it freezing soon after logging on. any help would be usefull
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It can definitely become a file server! A media server, do you mean like hooked up to your TV and playing HD video through the VGA port? That isn't exactly ideal. I'm not even sure the processor can handle an HD video. It is said it needs a passmark score of 2000 to be able to play an HD video no matter how it's encoded, Mpeg4, H264 or whatever. This one has got 970, though I've head it can be overclocked, if only a little.
Are you familiar with linux? If so I'd recommend ubuntu server, which has no front end. Upside is it's very light weight as you can imagine. Mine use about 200MB RAM and next to nothing on the CPU.
If you want to go with something like FreeNAS, which is better if the data you store is important, you'll need 1GB of ram for the OS and 1-1,5GB per TB of HDD space you have. You'll also need a minimum of two drives of equal size to make a RAID 1 (I think it's called something else in this context, but it's equivalent). Upside is it's got redundant space so if an HDD burns out you'll not have lost the data. I have to admit I don't know a whole lot about FreeNAS, you wanna ask around if you do decide to go that route.
FreeNAS wouldn't work as I plan to use a 4tb external drive to store all my media and it can only have 4gb installed.
I mean a media server as in it stores my media remotely and when I want it to play I just click the file either from my main windows machine, my Macbookpro or my consoles, mostly my MacBook.
I'm not overly familiar with Linux but if I have used the terminal before when I was in college
Thanks so much
Have you tested the 4TB drive on the machine yet? I think you'll run into problems, as most machines from that era can only handle up to 2TB drive capacities. This article gives an overview. You'll need a GUID partition table or GPT for short on the harddrive containing the OS. To do that you'll most likely need EFI/UEFI and not BIOS. The machine has to be able to run 62bit OS, which I think yours does. so just be sure to grab the 64bit OS image.
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