Server on Compaq Armada E500

[Difranco1911]

I have an extra Laptop here, its a P500 w/512MB of ram. I plan on hooking up a bunch of external USB Drives and turning this into a torrent box. Basically, I'd like to setup Transmission to download torrents automatically and save them to one of the USB drives. From there they'd be shared out to streamed over to my TV / PC.

Basically, my question is will I get decent performance out of Ubuntu to do this? What possibly using an older version, if so which?

I'd like to also encrypt the USB drives so that I'd have to manually mount them with a key everytime the system is booted/rebooted. Truecrypt?

[Drezard]

Try using Ubuntu 6.04.

Daniel