Maximum PC

I hope this is in the right place. I'll be using a Linux OS of one flavor or another for my server. I just need help figuring out if I can do what I want.

I'm hoping to kill two birds with one stone. My locale has great internet for cheap and I've decided to get rid of my cable tv and just use Hulu and other such on line entertainment for my tv. At the same time I'd also like to add a small server to my home network. As a practical matter my new server will be right next to my tv and will be wire connected to my router. My other computers are elsewhere in the home.

My question is can I use a server OS and still use that computer for streaming media from Hulu and elsewhere to my tv? I've never had a server and I know nothing about them. All I really know is that I like how they apparently handle files. I know that I can just use any OS and still grab data from it, but I would like to try a server.

What kind of server are you talking about here? Web server for the internet? Network Attached Storage for easy file sharing? E-mail? Proxy?

As for the OS, be warned that most "server" Linux distributions are command line only; servers don't have screens, so there's no point wasting resources on fancy graphical stuff. Web browsers, as far as I know, don't work here. You'd probably want a standard Linux OS like Mint if you're going to be using Hulu. Another note: last time I checked, NetFlix uses MS Silverlight, a proprietary plugin that has problems with Linux. To serve web stuff, you'll need a serving program (LightHTTPD is my recommendation), which should run fine on standard Linux.

I haven't used web TV much, so I might be wrong, but if you ask me you should ditch using a server OS and go graphical. You can still host a website or files or whatever, and navigating web TV will be a lot easier.