OT: New PC! Sorta...

[AgentZero]

I'm living in residence while I'm going to school, and there's 11 other people sharing a house with me. We all have fairly extensive collections of music & video that we share with each other, but it's currently a rather painful process, involving much CD/DVD burning, running around with USB keys, etc.

I'm thinking of making us a little server to alleviate this problem, so we can have a central location to dump all of our stuff, and access it as we need to.

I'm figuring on taking advantage of the wireless access provided to us in residence for this purpose, but I have a few questions.

Each of us can contribute around $100, so my total budget will be in the neighbourhood of $1200.

1) The OS. Since I want to maximize the amount of storage I can get, I'm thinking of a bare-bones linux distro with only a VNC type server to allow access & a rudimentary GUI. This would also have the benefit of letting me skimp a bit on other hardware, leaving more money from the budget for storage. I'm just not sure of a distro that fits this bill.

2) I want the machine to connect to the wireless network, but not have any access to/from the internet. Is there an easy way of doing this?

3) What would be the best way of getting the most storage capacity for my dollar. I'm looking for something in the 1-2TB range, and it can be stuck in a big case, so multiple HDs is not a problem.

4) Assuming I'm using SATA drives, how easy would it be to RAID together several volumes into one big one? Would I need a separate RAID controller?

5) With a server like the one I'm describing, where can I afford to skimp, and where should I invest money. Obviously graphics & sound are hardly necessary, so onboard graphics & sound, or no sound at all would do fine. I want to have a pretty reliable & zippy wireless connection, so what sort of wireless card should I look at? And what about the CPU and RAM?

Would I need a fairly hefty processor, or would a $50 Celeron suffice?

Same question with RAM. I can get 1GB of Corsair RAM for $55, but would that be enough to suit the needs of such a machine, or should I go for 2GB, or even 4GB?

I'm sure I'll come up with more, but I'll leave it at that for now and go get some sleep.

Edit: Oh, and about the VNC part, is this a good solution for a computer that's going to mainly have files copied back and forth to it? Not everyone in res is the terribly tech-savvy, so I want something that's as simple to use as possible.