Testing Out Linux. Part 1

I've known about GNU/Linux , and the whole open source thing, for sometime now. About a year ago I bought the 'Dummies Guide to Fedora Rore1' book. Hoping to get more into using Linux and also as my girl friend worked on Saturdays (the only day I could go to visit) I spent a lot of time in the town, so this book gave me something to do. I spent a few weeks flicking through it reading bits and pieces I then decided to try it out. I installed it on my test PC an old PII 350Mhz 128ram 3Gb drive. The install process of Fedora is quite easy with a nice GUI installer guiding you through what packages you want installed etc. After it had done its business installing, about 45-60mins install time, I was thrown into the deep end, with a rather dated looking desktop theme, my first mission was to connect to my main XP PC.
'Ok, how do I do that? Ah ha network tool. Oh, no card installed! Humm ok! Well I tried, where's my XP CD?'

After getting married and moving house I thought it would be great to have a file server for our music etc. I had already set up a network between my PC, my wife's, and her Mac. So adding a file server should be easy enough. Again out comes the old PII install Fedora on it again. This time I was more careful what I installed as I needed more space rather than toys, after the install I checked the space left on the 3Gb drive, only 400 or so Mb. Well there goes my conception that Linux was a smaller operating system than XP.
So now I'm on the hunt for a smaller distro, so google for 'lightweight Linux distro' all I come up with are the tiny distros eg50Mb. What I was after was something a little more fuller but not bloated. Then I came across Distrowatch.com in the packages list Ubuntu had all I needed, apache, php, samba, etc. and its on one CD (Fedora Core 3 is 4 CD's).
So set it up downloading overnight. The next night I had planned to install it (as long it downloaded ok, which it did). The next night I burnt it to CD and then got carried away designing a cover to print onto the CD. That was a week ago, last night I actually did the install. Even though it hasn't got a fancy installer like Fedora I actually found it easier than I thought to install. The only hard bit would have been disk partitioning but as it had Fedora on it previously I just reformatted the partitions that were already there. The only down side to the installation was the time, over 2 hours later I eventually had the login screen in front of me, (my only worry was I didn't remember putting the root password in?) anyhow login fine.
First objective, check root password, 'Great the same as my login password, really secure!' So promptly change it and then have a little nose around, the GUI still isn't as nice as XP or OSX it still needs some work, I then check the network, well the internet works so looks hopeful.
Next objective set up shared folder on the network. 'Oh, samba isn't installed'. At that point I decided to leave it for another day, as it was an hour later than I was expecting due to the lengthy install time.