Setting up a home server

Zounds

Hello,
I am hoping to could get some advice. I have a PC I'm not using at the moment, mainly due to space issues and the general usefulness of my laptop. I wish to set this up as a server. However I've run into some issues regarding a general lack of knowledge in this area on my part. There are a few things I want to do with this server:

I want to be able to store media on it and preferably stream it to my laptop,
I'd like to leave my external harddrive plugged into it and access the media on that in the same way,
I'd like to run a BitTorrent client on the machine,
I'd like to use it to make wireless printing available to all the laptops in the house (a mix of Linux and Mac OS X),
I need to be able to control if without a monitor and being able to control it and access media over the internet as well as from within the home network would be a perk.

I'm inclined to use Linux over any other operating systems as it's free and I'm familiar with it.
Any advice on how to implement this would be great. Thank you.

Tillotson

A bit embarrassing but here's the wiki entry I made on my college server for doing just this:

http://orion.itsligo.ie/wiki/doku.php?id=how_to:setting_up_linux_file_server

EDIT: There's probably inaccuracies and omissions

It's not hard, pm me if you have any trouble.

Zounds

That looks very helpful, thanks.