Pulled my last electric bill.... $60.60 for 557kWh. That's about $0.1088/kWh. The fact that the physical machines are used 24/7/366 (this year) makes this a moot point. At least 2 of the PCs must be available to run multiple virtual machines for clients.

Be certain to setup transcoding video and commercial cutting too! Get your $25 (+ $20 shipping) out of the box! I read it doesn't come with a PSU, so add $20 to get one of those universal laptop PSUs too.

a) ssh rocks. I don't leave home without one ... or 4 up.

You are definitely correct, however, web analytics shows when the fewest users are on. Those are the times when maintenance and updates need to be scheduled. This assumes you only have 1 front-end server. In a professional setup, there should be 2 of everything, if not more. Obviously, clients can overrule this, but a…

Perhaps I'm just old.

Linux is about choice, not mandates from 1 company or 1 person.

For desktop, I use buntu Server 10.04 x32 LTS with LXDE loaded - I'm lazy. No GPU accel is enabled.

Forget FTPS. ssh includes scp and sftp. That is what you want. Bonehead simple AND secure. Very few people should use straight FTP anymore. Check that link above for all the reasons.

Why APT? This APT has Super Cow Powers.

Anyone setup a L2TP/IPSec PSK VPN server such that Android 2.x and 3.x clients can actually connect?

Perhaps [www.openmediavault.org] ? But there are hundreds of different ways to share files. The biggest performance limitation will be your upstream bandwidth from your ISP.

"import" from the ImageMagick suite. Since it is CLI, we can script it to do anything - save, resize, optimize and push where ever.

a) USB connected to a router is not a NAS. That is a DAS.

Ah... that helps. If I were you, I wouldn't bother dual booting at all. Assuming your CPU is as capable as your RAM, you'll be very happy running either Windows or Linux inside a virtual machine, provided you do not expect high end graphics capabilities.

This is difficult without knowing the

/.

Pepper spray.

If all you want is to backup 3 Windows PCs to an extern USB HDD connected to one of them, there many solutions for that, including crashplan.

It seems possible, but not easy.

Odd, I did a weekend last month with OSX and felt the same. Deeply underwhelmed. I've been a Linux user about 95% the last 4 yrs. Prior to that I was 95% Windows desktop, but UNIX/Linux servers.