So i am presently building up a storage/media center PC for my household and i have no idea what OS to load it up with.
Basically all we need it for is storing massive amounts of data, video and music, and streaming said video and music to our television and stereo. The computer in question would be connecting to a network that has 4 XP Pro computers, and 1 Ubuntu (which is a dual-boot).
I am leaning more towards linux on this one and since the only one i have any knowledge of is ubuntu i am leaning towards putting that on there. Any thoughts perhaps on a more media friendly distro? How much of a headache is it to have XP computers reading/writing to it were i to go that route? I refuse to even look at Vista in my house until SP1, despite the protests of my roomates ("it's so flashy and pretty"), so that is out of the question, however i am open to XP media center. How is the user experience on that? I am also contemplating an X-Fi card in this box, but am leary as i have no idea on whether Creative plays nice with Linux?

Now for the opinion question... I am tossing in 6 500GB seagates, should i bother with Raid 1+0? (never really worried about redundacy before...)

Thanks a bunch!